Initiated in 2006, the Early English Laws project aims to
produce new editions of all legal codes and treatises produced
in England between the reign of Æthelberht of Kent (ca 580-616)
and Magna Carta (1215). The project addresses four principal
research questions or problems: - What are the early English law
texts? - What do the texts say? - What do the texts mean? - What
exactly was the law? The project address these questions by
providing high quality digital images of the manuscripts,
transliterations, philological notes, translations, and
scholarly commentary, all of which can be compared line by line
in the very nice interface. Eg, here is Æthelberht’s Code, which
the project describes as: This law-code is thought to be the one
Bede attributes (Historia ecclesiastica, 2.5) to King Æthelberht
of Kent (560–616). It has survived in a single manuscript
written at Rochester in the early twelfth century. The code
resembles most early Germanic law-codes, treating issues such as
interpersonal violence, wergeld,