Old English Law and the Constructing of Legal Time

Abstract

Newly-composed codes of law surf a wave at the limen of preceding legal history and proceeding legal renovation. Modern statutory composition, however, tends to be deeply suspicious of retrospectivity: new laws achieve their authority by extinguishing the authority of what has gone before them. Within this modern legal-textual temporality, the value of prescriptive law has a finite duration as it lives along linear time. It is text born already under the shadow of its future invalidation. But early medieval English legal text responds to (and constructs) time in a very different way. Here, textual value and legal interest are in many ways compounded with the passing of time. In the retrospective re-creation of past beginnings found in the introductions to Anglo-Saxon law codes, in the imaginative and affective aesthetic created by the language and form of the codes themselves, and even in the textual flexibility resulting from their significant degree of manuscript mouvance, we find a construction of legal time which resists straightforward categorisation according to modern understandings of legal authority. The temporal authority of the Old English law code is achieved not by denial or rebuttal, but by bringing the past forward to make polyphonic the voice of the new present. In this system of law-code composition, there is no break with the past; l’ancien regime transforms itself into and is transformed out of the new regime: it precedes from its own past and present. This talk demonstrates the ways in which Old English law codes behave as a kind of literary text. These codes, straddling the legal and the literary, emerge as texts with their own imaginative aesthetic, temporal force and legal authority.