Tom Lambert

Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England

It is the title which gives away a great deal about this very fine book, and should alert us to Tom Lambert’s ambition for this project, which has grown out of a University of Durham PhD thesis. ‘Law’ positions it as a work of legal history, but it is the component of ‘order’ which offers the second and bolder half of Lambert’s argument. Under the heading of ‘law’, Lambert examines the surviving codes and legal texts of AngloSaxon England, teasing out their implications and asking how they might best be placed in the context of other evidence which has not survived. The heading of ‘order’, however, is much more expansive: it encompasses not just the imposition of law and legal norms, nor simply the attempt of law to construct models for ‘orderly’ behaviour, but strikes at the ordering of society, social relations and expectations, and hierarchy. The other clue to the scope of this project lies in that final part of the title, for Lambert really does aim to cover almost all of Anglo-Saxon England, proceeding from the sixth century to the 11th. Indeed, implicit in his argument is the assertion that examining a shorter period would obscure a fundamental reality: that Anglo-Saxon legal culture worked within a set of basically unchanging parameters.