UR TV CAST

There are justified concerns also that Turkey’s size and the acute poverty of some of its regions could shipwreck the Union’s economic success.The Commission has done well to address these objections and to list the steps Turkey must yet take if it is to overcome them. But every so often something different appears: a monument of detailed learning which almost re-creates its subject. (Lewis Namier’s The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 1929, is a case in point.) The Making of English Law is in this class. Its scholarship, brilliance and integrity remain as a lasting memorial to Wormald and a reminder of how much his too early death has cost the world of learning.Like many eminent scholars Patrick Wormald was not always an easy man. He had taken Volume II a long way; let us hope far enough for it now to be published in some form.Very numerous historical monographs are published nowadays. Most of them are all very well in their way; but many are written to the demands of a ludicrous thing, “The Research Assessment Exercise”, and their existence matters to few indeed, apart from their authors. Assessment of the number of early texts which may once have existed depends on very close consideration of the likely ancestry of those which survive.

Wormald argues that, at least in some periods, laws were circulated on loose sheets, or bundles of sheets of parchment, which would have a poor chance of survival.The quantity and quality of Anglo-Saxon legislation present many and curious contrasts with that from other countries. This is one of the themes which he would have dealt with in his intended second volume. We have long been taught that the law in England was transformed under Henry II (1154-1189) when, to oversimplify, the considerably rational replaced the considerably archaic Wormald indicates the possibility of a different tale. Much that determined life and rule in England, for centuries, was in place by 1066. It has become increasingly apparent that late Anglo-Saxon England was a nation state with a sophisticated administration (another matter on which Wormald wrote well). Why does so much more eighth- and ninth-century legislation survive from the Continent than from England? Why does so much more survive in the 10th century from England than from the Continent? Wormald made many fruitful suggestions, always emphasising a fundamental contrast between the north and the southern/Mediterranean lands of written law where the shadow of the Roman Empire fell, as it did not fall in England.Studies such as this have great weight and interest.

At the same time some legislation, for example in the earlier 10th century, had less explicit ideological content.A second question. How far has Anglo-Saxon legislation survived? Some, he proves, has been lost. Maybe a great deal? After all, the three earliest codes have survived only by the skin of their teeth: in one 12th-century manuscript Certainly some have gone. Here, as in facing the first question, Wormald deployed great skill, and it must have been hundreds and hundreds of hours, in close analysis of the manuscripts in which those laws which do survive, survive.Thus the case for the essentially ideological drive of the Alfredian laws is strengthened by their appearing in manuscripts in association with The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The complications and associations of the Wulfstan material are mightily assisted by the presence in some manuscripts of annotations in his hand. A knowledge of European law and laws over many centuries is essential for comparison and the establishment of context. To provide a complete account of Anglo-Saxon law (and of its essential complement, Anglo-Norman law and legal writing) is a daunting task.