Within a few years of Augustine's arrival in Kent in 597 – on a mission which, combined with that of Aidan a few years later in the north, would lead to the Christianisation of most of England by the mid-seventh century – the lawcode of the Kentish king, Æthelberht (d. 616), had been written down in English. One of the priorities of the law-makers (and Augustine himself was presumably involved) was to integrate the needs of the new church within the established legal system, whose origins lay in the Germanic traditions of the Continent. Bede notes with obvious approval, in his Historia ecclesiastica, that the Kentish lawcode opens with an article for the protection of the new religion, especially the property of the church and its officials; thus he corroborates the content of the received text, without citing it directly. From now on this would be a distinctive feature of all the English lawcodes.

Another primary object of Anglo-Saxon law was to formalise and contain the more destructive aspects of the Germanic feud system, whose structure of reciprocal loyalties demanded the exacting of revenge for wrongs done to kin or to associates. Æthelberht's laws, and those of his successors, sought to limit the circumstances under which private revenge might be taken and to set out a sliding scale of compensatory payments, dependent on the status of both the victim and the perpetrator of crime and the circumstances under which it was committed.