56 English and Continental Backgrounds
the treatment of the Welsh, many of whom he ruled.
It seems likely that there were early written dooms in
Northumbria and East Anglia, and it is known that Offa
of Mercia made laws in the eighth century, but these have
been lost while those of the Kentish kings and of Ini
have come down to us. After Offa there was an interval
of about a century in which no written laws were made.
Legislation was, in a sense, refounded and made a normal
function of the central government under the West-
Saxon dynasty by Alfred. Alfred's laws differed some-
what from those of earlier kings in that there was more of
the codifying purpose: he went through the earlier laws
to select the best, making, he says, small changes and addi-
tions of his own. In Edward the Elder's laws there was
regulation of the four-weekly court later identified with
the hundred, also more rigid provisions for buying and
selling before witnesses; Athelstan's were broad in scope,
emphasising the lord's responsibility and that every man
must have a lord, and they also experimented with groups
organised for the pursuit and apprehension of criminals,
a systematising of the probably older hue and cry obliga-
tion in London and vicinity;1 Edmund's (perhaps under
Dunstan's influence) were hostile to private war and the
kin responsibility in connection with the system of wers
and favoured the responsibility of each man for his own
acts; Edgar's are notable for stressing church obligations,
rules for buying and selling, the hue and cry police groups,
and first show clearly the nature and times of meeting of
the different local courts. The written laws of Cnute,
the Danish conqueror of England who in this matter of
legislation as in so many others followed English custom,
were comparatively numerous, and were divided into
two parts or enactments, one ecclesiastical and one
secular. Though often called Cnute's code only a small
part consists of earlier dooms. It was lawmaking of a
high order and brought the Anglo-Saxon dooms to a noble
conclusion, for the Confessor made no laws. By Cnute,
1 See below, pp. 67-69.