User:Deacon of Pndapetzim/sandbox

I Æthelred, also known as the Woodstock Code, is a piece of legislation or decree (gerædnys)^[1] produced by King Æthelred II of England, Æthelred "the Unready", c. 997, at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. The ordinances are concerned with thieves and the regulations concerning their punishment.

The text of I Æthelred represents, in the words of the Early English Law project, "the regulations produced by a royal council meeting", at Woodstock in Oxfordshire, "that may have taken place in 997".^[2] Like the later Wantage Code, the text of I Æthelred refers to an earlier royal assembly held at Bromdun,^[3][4] with the Woodstock legislation applying to "English law" what the Wantage Code did for "Danish" areas under Æthelred's dominion.^[3] The code's prologue contains what historian Ann Williams called "the first appearance of the term 'English law'".^[3]

I Æthelred survives in the three main twelfth-century manuscript traditions preserving early English law, the Quadripartitus, Textus Roffensis and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383.^[5] According to historian Patrick Wormald, there "are no significant variants in any copy",^[5] despite "two or three substantially independent transmissions", meaning that the surviving version "may not be far from the archetype".^[6] The code seems to be the only one of his reign where the text, in the words of Anne Williams, has been "preserved in something like the form in which it emerged from the royal council."^[3]

The prologue of I Æthelred is very close in wording to that from Edgar the Peaceful's Andover Code.^[1] Likewise, the opening of provision 1 of the code reproduces the "Andover" legislation almost verbatim.^[8] There are structural similarities too, and like the Andover decree the Woodstock text is also in the third person, except for the final clause that makes reference to "the declaration of us all".^[1]

Provision 1 of I Æthelred is an important source for the concept of tihtbysig, "charge-taken"; if legislation from Cnut's era is reliable, the status of tihtbysig was imposed upon an individual when they came under accusations from three people and when a local [[Hundred (county division) |hundred]] ruled that the person was ungetreow ("untrue"). Provision 1.2 (followed by Cnut's) legislation indicates that the accused could only overturn this status through the help of his lord, who either through his own reeve or in person and along with two other getreow("true") men had to swear on oath that "the accused had never failed in oath or ordeal, nor paid ðeofgyld [thief-gild]".^[9] The same provision is also important for attesting the apparent right of the king to "receive fines paid by all men who held bocland",^[10] land possessed through a charter from, in this case, an earlier king.^[11]

Legislation in the tenth and eleventh centuries became increasingly harsh against accused thieves, with decrees in the reigns of Edgar and Cnut advocating execution no matter what socn, "protection", the accused sought.^[12] Provision 1 of I Æthelred, however, indicates that accused thieves in certain cases could clear themselves by oath, if they had "never failed in ordeal, nor broken an oath, nor paid ðeofgyld".^[12] That a convicted thief could survive to be a accused again seems to show, mirroring law later issued under Æthelred's successor Cnut, that people convicted of theft could keep their lives through payment of this ðeofgyld ("thief payment").^[13]

Patrick Wormald characterised the code as one that "sought to integrate the activity of the lord and the neighbourhood".^[14][15] Provision 4 specified that people regarded in their local communities as "untrue", ungetreow, were to be put under surety, but that if this proved impossible they could be killed and buried in unconsecrated ground.^[16] The same provision, according to the historian Tom Lambert, provides evidence for a major development in how law was enforced in medieval England.^[17] Earlier legislation, according to Lambert, imagined that when "someone need[ed] to ride to an untrustworthy man’s home and either place him under surety or kill him" that the party doing the enforcement was a collectively organised group of locals;^[17] but in provision 4, Lambert points out, "the part doing the enforcement is now 'the king's reeve' and "there is no mention of a communal expedition".^[18]