The Anglo-Saxon Laws

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English Historical Review. 1913. Vol. 28. №111. P. 417-430.Professor Liebermann has not entirely completed the publication of his studies on the Anglo-Saxon laws. We still await a third volume, containing introductory essays and the long-promised notes to his translations. But the first volume presents the text of the whole corpus, together with a critical apparatus; and the two glossaries which make up the second supply us with many, if not most, of the necessary elucidations. He has accomplished the larger part of his Herculean task. There is nothing premature in offering him our thanks and our congratulations. It was in 1875 that Dr. Liebermann first made his appearance in print as a student of Old-English law. That year saw the publication of his prolegomena to the Dialogus de Scaccario, in which he indicated some of the problems suggested by the Leges Edwardi. This edition of the Anglo-Saxon laws was planned asearly as 1883, when the Royal Bavarian Academy, with a liberality for which English historians cannot be too grateful, undertook to assist in defraying the expense of publication. Since 1888, when Dr. Liebermann concluded his labours on the editorial staff of the Monumenta Germaniae, his energies have been entirely devoted to the laws, and to the documents which illustrate their meaning or assist in the reconstruction of their text. His preliminary investigations bore fruit in an imposing series of monographs: editions of the Quadripartitus (1891) and the Consiliatio Cnuti (1893); eessays on the Leges Anglorum (1894), the Constitutiones de Foresta (1894), the Leges Edwardi (1896), and the Leges Henrici (1901).