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or lex non scripta, and commences that of the statute law, or lex scripta. This settle ment took place about the middle of the fifth century; but Christianity was not in troduced till the seventh century; the con version of the first Christian King of the Heptarchy having taken place about 598, and that of the last about 696. Here, then, was a space of 200 years, during which the common law was in existence, and Christi anity no part of it. If it ever, therefore, was adopted into the common law, it must have been between the introduction of Chris tianity and the date of the Magna diaria. But of the laws of this period, we have a tolerable collection, by Lambard and Wilkins; probably not perfect, but neither very de fective; and if any one chooses to build a doctrine on any law of that period, supposed to have been lost, it is incumbent on him to prove it to have existed, and what were its contents. . . . But none of these adopt Christianity as a part of the common law. If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons to the introduction of Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians; and if, having their laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are able to find among them, no such adoption, we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the com mon law." Jefferson then adds negative proof of the correctness of his position. He points to the silence of Bracton on the subject in his treatise on the common law, written a few years after the Magna Charta, silence all the more convincing because he himself was an ecclesiastic and would not have failed to introduce a subject so important to the church. He finds Glanvil, Fleta and Britton, and other early writers on the law, equally silent on the subject. "It was reserved for Finch, five hundred

years after, in the time of Charles II., by a falsification of a phrase in the Year Book, to open this new doctrine, and for his success ors to join full mouthed in the cry, and give the fiction the sound of fact." But, turning to the laws themselves, the genuine laws of Alfred and the Jewish laws, we find, as Jefferson found, inconsistencies which cannot be reconciled on the theory invented by Finch and given respectability by Sir Matthew Hale. The Jewish code punishes murder with death. Alfred punishes murder by a fine, called a weregild, proportioned to the condi tion of the person murdered. By the Jewish law, to strike a woman with child so that she die is death. By the code of AKred, the offender' pays a weregild for both the woman and her child. In Exodus, the servant who loses an eye or a tooth at the hand of his master receives his freedom. In Alfred's laws, a fixed sum is paid as compensation. Theft of an ox or a sheep, under Jewish law, was repaid five fold for the ox, four fold for the sheep. The Alfredian idea of justice was payment of the worth of the cow, and forty shillings indemnity. If an ox gore a man, the Jews kill the ox and abstain from eating the flesh. Alfred compensates the wounded person by giving him the ox. Let these selected instances suffice. Jef ferson maintains that the pretended laws prefixed to the real laws of Alfred, covering concubinage, theft, retaliation, compulsory marriage, usury, bailment, laws known to historians as the Pseudograph, were never the laws of England in Alfred's time, nor at any other time; that they were, as Houard in his Coutumes Anglo -Normandсs terms them, Hors d'oeuvre of some pious copyist "This awkward monkish fabrication makes the preface to Alfred's genuine laws stand in the body of the work. And the very words of Alfred himself prove the fraud; for he declares in that preface that he has