1. INTRODUCTION

The Old English code attributed to King AEthelberht exists in a single manuscript composed in the twelfth century, the Textus Roffensis. (1) It is ostensibly the first example of written English law. There are few reasons to believe that the code is not what it claims to be: the code which, according to Bede, was prepared shortly after the conversion of Kent by Augustine, "after the examples of the Romans" (iuxta exempla Romanorum). (2) Philological studies of the text by Sievers and Liebermann have confirmed that it contains forms sufficiently archaic for it to have been copied from a seventh-century archetype. (3)

Bede's assertion that the code was ...