Executive Functions

The Long Arm of the Law

A manuscript image often used to demonstrate the King and his Witan dispensing justice. It was drawn in the 11th century, and is a paraphrase of the bible partly translated by Ælfric who was a major chronicler of 10th century monastic revival. The far left hand end of this illumination is repaired

The English tribes who came over from the Continent already possessed an elaborate and developed legal system. The Christian influence to which the law was exposed from the sixth century onwards caused a few changes, especially with regard to family law, but the basic structure remained unchanged. Any system of government has three basic functions: the legislative, which makes the law; the executive, which ensures that those laws are observed; and the judicial, which determines whether laws have been broken and, if so, exacts punishment.

Legislative Functions

The legislative functions of Anglo-Saxon England were carried out by the king and his council or, sometimes, by the council alone. Codes of law were produced at regular intervals by kings, and the issue of a new code was an opportunity to add new statutes, modify existing ones, or re-state old laws that were being ignored. Copies of the laws were then made and sent out to the ealdormen, bishops, and reeves who would be responsible for their administration. Many of these law codes still survive, especially in Church archives, but there was also a mass of customary law which was handed on orally. No attempt seems to have been made to codify this until after the Conquest, when much was forgotten or misunderstood. It is mostly this customary law which led to differences between West Saxon law, Mercian law and Danish law. However, it is fair to say that there were just as many differences within, say, West Saxon law as there were between that and Mercian law.

Executive Functions

For the executive function, Anglo-Saxon England did not have a professional standing law enforcement body like our modern police. In general, if a crime was committed then there was a victim, and it was up to the victim - or the victim's family - to seek justice. However, during the tenth century, a number of administrative changes took place in England which led to the formation of a semi-professional constabulary of sorts. The first step was to divide the shires into hundreds (in Danish areas, the term wapentake was used), a reorganisation which probably occurred during the reigns of Edward the Elder and Athelstan. After this, each hundred was further divided under Athelstan into groups of ten freemen called tithings, of which there seem to have been ten in every hundred.

One man in each tithing was senior to, and responsible for, the other nine, and he was called the tithingman. In every hundred, a hundredman was appointed and he, together with the ten tithingmen and a clerk, met every four weeks if possible, "at the time of the filling of the butts".

The main function of this group seems to have been administrative: the king spoke to the shire-reeve, the shire-reeve spoke to the hundredmen, and the hundredmen spoke to the tithingmen. However, Athelstan and Edgar both passed laws which reinforced the hundredmen as the principal law enforcement arm of the Anglo-Saxon executive. Hundredmen were responsible for seeing that legitimate trading was encouraged and cattle-theft actively discouraged. If a village failed to report suspicious movements of cattle, the hundredmen could see to it that the herdsmen were flogged. In following the trail of a thief, the hundredman was to take one or two men from each tithing. The hundredmen and tithingmen were not a police force as we would recognise it: prime responsibility for bringing offenders to justice still remained with the victim. However, they filled an important role in dealing with crimes that broke the king's peace, a group of crimes that were considered to be against the king himself. They may also have acted as a useful body of men that the courts could call upon if necessary. For example, Ethelred issued a code at Wantage for use in the Five Boroughs: twelve of the leading men in the hundred, together with the king's reeve, were to swear on relics that they would accuse no innocent man nor conceal any guilty one. They were then to seize the men who had been frequently accused and against whom the reeve was taking action.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14