Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 55
the people's interest. While the witan's routine work was
what we should call administrative, yet it had its share
in what was perhaps the most notable achievement of the
Anglo-Saxon central government—the written laws.
While most of the law of the country was local and tin-
written, unconsciously made by the people and admin-
istered by them in the local courts, yet at intervals
throughout the period, kings, actuated by various motives,
put laws in writing which, taken together, make a unique
record in legislation for that time. At the beginning of
the seventh century Ethelbert of Kent issued ninety brief
laws, called dooms, * the first laws of a Teutonic people in
a Teutonic language. It is remarkable that so immedi-
ately after acquiring an alphabet and the art of writing
from the Roman missionaries, writing should have been
used for Anglo-Saxon; yet the evidence is good that these
laws were from the start in the vernacular. The purpose
appears to have been to make clear the rights and special
privileges of the new Christian clergy and to publish a
long list of fines for a variety of misdeeds, perhaps thereby
striking a balance or compromise for the whole of Kent
amongst divergent local penalties. It certainly could not
have been an attempt to codify the Kentish law, as even
the most superficial reading will show. The Anglo-Saxons
did not feel the same need to preserve their native law by
codification as did the Germanic peoples who had in-
vaded the Roman Empire on the continent and who were
living in the midst of a more numerous and more civilised
population who used the Roman law. Later Kentish
kings of the same century issued laws which were little
more than revisions of, and small additions to, Ethelbert's
dooms. Then at the end of the century Ini began law-
making for Wessex, his motive perhaps being to regulate
1 The use of this word shows that there was in mind no distinction be-
tween a court judgment and this act of king and witan, which, lacking a
better term, we call legislation. Whatever of addition to, or modification of,
unwritten custom these dooms contained seems not to have been incom-
patible with their idea that law was a thing immemorial, fundamental,
not makable. See below, p. 411 ff.