394 FOUBTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
The Christian character of English legislation is due in large measure to the piety of the Anglo-Saxon kings, especially Alfred the Great (849-901), and Edward III., the Confessor (1004- 1066, canonized by Alexander III., 1166), who prepared digests of the laws of the realm. Their piety was, of course, ascetic and monastic, but enlightened for their age and animated by the spirit of justice and charity. The former is styled Legum Anglicanarum Conditor, the latter Legum Anglicanarum Restitutor.
Alfred's Dome-Book or Liber justicialis was lost during the irruption of the Danes, but survived in the improved code of Edward the Confessor. Alfred was for England what Charle magne was for France and Germany, a Christian ruler, legislator, and educator of his people. He is esteemed " the wisest, best, and greatest king that ever reigned in England." Although he was a great sufferer from epilepsy or some similar bodily in firmity which seized him suddenly from time to time and made him despair of life, he performed, like St. Paul in spite of his thorn in the flesh, an incredible amount of work. The grateful memory of his people ascribed to him institutions and laws, rights and privileges which existed before his time, but in many respects he was far ahead of his age. When he ascended the throne, " hardly any one south of the Thames could understand the ritual of the church or translate a Latin letter." He con ceived the grand scheme of popular national education. For this end he rebuilt the churches and monasteries which had been ruined by the Danes, built new ones, imported books from Rome, invited scholars from the Continent to his court, translated with their aid Latin works (as Gregory's Pastoral Care, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, and Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy) into the Anglo-Saxon, collected the laws of the country, and remodelled the civil and ecclesiastical organization of his kingdom.
His code is introduced with the Ten Commandments and other laws taken from the Bible. It protects the stranger in memory of Israel's sojourn in Egypt ; it gives the Christian
2 91. ENGLISH LEGISLATION. 395
slave freedom in the seventh year, as the Mosaic law gave to the Jewish bondman ; it protects the laboring man in his Sunday rest; it restrains bloodthirsty passions of revenge by establishing bots or fines for offences ; it enjoins the golden rule (in the nega tive form), not to do to any man what we would not have done to us.1
"In all these words of human brotherhood, of piety, and the spirit of justice, of pity and humanity, uttered by the barbaric lawgivers of a wild race, there speaks a great Personality — the embodiment of the highest sympathy and most disinterested virtue of mankind. It cannot be said indeed that these religious influences, so apparently genuine, produced any powerful effect on society in Anglo-Saxon England, though they modified the laws. Still they began the history of the religious forces in England which, though obscured by much formalism and hypocrisy and weakened by selfishness, have yet worked out slowly the great moral and humane reforms in the history of that country, and have tended with other influences to make it one of the great leaders of modern progress." 2
NOTES.
John Richard Green, in his posthumous work, The Conquest of England (N. York ed. 1884, p. 179 sq.), pays the following eloquent and just tribute to the character of King Aelfred (as he spells the name) : "Aelfred stands in the forefront of his race, for he is the noblest as he is the most complete embodiment of all that is great, all that is lovable in the English temper, of its practical energy, its patient and enduring force, of the reserve and self-control that give steadiness and sobriety to a wide outlook and a restless daring, of its temperance and fairness, its frank ness and openness, its sensitiveness to affection, its poetic tenderness, its deep and reverent religion. Religion, indeed, was the groundwork of Aelfred's character. His temper was instinct with piety. Everywhere, throughout his writings that remain to us, the name of God, the thought
1 For further information on Alfred see the biographies of Pauli (1851, Engl. transl. by Thorpe, 1853), Weiss (1852), Hughes (Lond. and Bost. 1869), Freeman's Old English History, and Green's Conquest of England (1884), ch. IV. 124-180.
1 Brace, Gesta Christi, p. 216.