The Angles and Saxons were invaders of the land later called England who fought, conquered and stayed, as the Romans had done before, and the Vikings and the Normans would do after. They migrated from Germany in the fifth and sixth centuries and established a number of kingdoms, most notably Kent, Wessex, East Anglia and Mercia. Anglo-Saxon law, which took root in England, has often been portrayed as part of the history of this receding Germanic past almost unchanging in the five hundred years from the code of Aethelbert to the laws of Henry I, and as the province not of royal power but of popular liberties. This is fallacious in at least two respects.

Certainly the law that prevailed in England immediately before the Norman Conquest owed little if anything to the Celts or Romans. Older Anglo-Saxon codes, especially those of Kent and Wessex, owed much to their Germanic inheritance. From their inception, however, they did not stagnate but began to grow, and other influences – notably Scandinavian – began to impinge on, or infiltrate, the legal landscape.

Secondly, royal involvement was crucial in the development of AngloSaxon codes. English law and its universality sprang not primarily from the field and the hearth, but largely from the power and reach of its early Christian kings. Its vitality survived their deposition; it did not succumb to the so-called ‘Norman Yoke’. It was instead nurtured by the successors of the Anglo-Saxons.