Early English Laws
The project aims to edit or re-edit and translate all 138 early English legal codes, edicts and treatises produced up to the time of Magna Carta 1215, and to provide each with an introduction and full commentary on all aspects of the texts, language and law. It also aims to provide a comprehensive resource on early law, including introductory essays on issues of law, language, archaeology, palaeography and codicology, descriptions of all manuscripts holding legal texts and used for this edition, glossaries in Old English, Latin and Anglo-Norman, and a regularly updated bibliography and guide to the literature, with links to relevant philological and archaeological sites.
Project
Project link
arts-humanities.net
Principal investigator
Dr Jane Winters
Principal project staff
Dr Jane Winters (Principal Investigator), Paul Spence (Co-Investigator), Professor Bruce O’Brien (Academic Adviser), Dr Jenny Benham (Project Editor)
Start date
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Completion date
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
Era
Place
Digital resources created
Online edition of all 138 early English legal texts produced up to the time of Magna Carta 1215, with translation, commentaries and introductory sections. In the first phase (autumn 2011), about ten texts will be published, along with the bibliography, images of the texts and the current editions of the laws available in Felix Liebermann's Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen.
The website will contain an online collaborative workspace where historians, students and other interested parties can post queries and comments about the texts, the laws and legal history in general, as well as arguments for alternative reconstructions of texts, translations and interpretations.
Source material
Legal codes and treatises produced in England between the reign of Æthelberht of Kent and Magna Carta (1215). Mauscripts and the universally cited and still useful editions of Liebermann and Stubbs (Select Charters 1913).
Data formats
Metadata standards