A handlist of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits

There is no acknowledged corpus of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits. Scholars have had the benefit of Bigelow's Placita Anglo-Normannica for over a century, and this will soon be superseded by the definitive edition which has occupied Professor van Caenegem since 1952. But the nearest that Anglo-Saxonists have come to a counterpart is the set of thirty-five ‘Select Cases in Anglo-Saxon Law’ appended to the Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, which four of Bigelow's fellow Bostonians published as a symbolic, if apparently unintended, celebration of America's origins in centennial 1876. The limitations of this admittedly useful exercise extend beyond the facts that three of its cases are not Anglo-Saxon at all, and that its editors were unable to distinguish between the Latin names for Dover and Canterbury. Since then, the selections of Harmer, Robertson and Whitelock have made many more texts generally available, but without isolating the procedural records from other ‘historical documents’. Mean-while, the English evidence was ignored in the impressive list which Hübner intended as the basis of Placita section in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica: that august institution has tracked Germanic footsteps across the Alps, the Rhine, the Pyrenees and even the Straits of Gibraltar, but it as seldom followed. the Anglo-Saxons across the North Sea.