The laws of the West Saxon king Ine (r. 688–726) are irresistible. They’re not the earliest laws we have, but they are much more revealing than any of the other seventh-century laws from the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. I think few people are immediately taken with the dreary procedural rules in Hlothhere & Eadric (issued in the 680s) or the church-council-esque decree of King Wihtræd (695). Of course, the earliest surviving law-text, the laws of Æthelberht (d. c. 616), is fascinating, but mostly because of what it hides. And for some of us, there’s too much that’s hidden and unknowlable.

But that is not the case with Ine! Where Æthelberht’s laws never even mention that king (only later attributions allow us to assume they are his), Ine’s laws mention real people (known from other sources) and the circumstances of its making (albeit bare bones).

And where Æthelberht is telegraphic, cryptic, gnomic, Ine combines some of the legalese of Hlothhere (i.e. giving us legal details) with evocative images of the seventh century. As historians, we feel like we can actually do something with clauses like these:

Ðonne mon beam on wuda forbærne 7 weorðe yppe on þone ðe hit dyde, gielde he fulwite: geselle LX scill.; forþamþe fyr bið þeof. Gif mon afelle on wuda wel monega treowa, 7 wyrð eft undierne, forgielde III treowu ælc mid XXX scill. Ne ðearf he hiora ma geldan, wære hiora swa fela swa hiora wære: forþon sio æsc bið melda, nalles ðeo. [Ine 43–43.1]

When someone burns a tree in the woods and it should become known who did it, he should pay the full fine, he should give 60 shillings, because fire is a thief. If someone should fell many trees in the woods and afterwards it should become uncovered, he should pay for three trees each with 30 shillings. He does not need to pay more, be they as many as they are, because the axe is an informer, not at all a thief.

Not only does it potentially reveal something about the lives of normal people and things like the value of raw materials, but it also gives us enough legal detail to say something about compensation practices, liability and so on. And on top of that, we get some rare legal maxims, poetic but still clear, potentially revealing some broader legal ideas and principles.

So, if you want to know something about families, food, farming, slavery, guilds, taxation, ordeals, money or social structures in seventh-century Wessex, look to Ine.

But we really have to show much more restraint in the way we deal with this evidence.

This is because the textual transmission of Ine’s laws is difficult, even by the standards of Anglo-Saxon law-texts. It only survives as part of the law-code of King Alfred, issued some 200 years later than Ine lived. Ine’s laws appear as a self-contained unit, but they have been integrated into the wider code by being numbered consecutively after Alfred’s laws. The numbers and headings for Ine’s chapters are also included in the list of chapters at the star of the code.¹

This means that we don’t have access to Ine’s laws other than as they were mediated by Alfred. The current consensus is that the team working on Alfred’s code ‘modernized’ the prose (the Old English of Ine conform to ninth-century standards) but otherwise left the text untouched. I’ve written more about this here.

Personally, I don’t think that’s the whole story. Ine may in fact be a ninth-century translation into Old English from a seventh-century Latin original.² What’s more, the original appears to be influenced by continental models from the sixth and seventh century, such as Lex Salica or Excerpta de libris romanorum et francorum. This means that what we can read on the manuscript page isn’t necessarily what was written in Ine’s reign (688–726). The implication is that the language reflects a ninth-century translators interpretation of seventh-century Anglo-Latin.

Even people who disagree with this theory of mine must be more cautious – the text of Ine’s laws has been passed down to us in a way that should make anyone suspicious and it has so many odd oddities (not like your normal oddities in Anglo-Saxon law). Relying on words and phrases from Ine is therefore problematic (general sense less so). No case is better to illustrate the problems than that of ethnicity.

The evidence in question are the laws that mention a wealh, here to be understood as a Briton (though the word can also mean ‘foreigner’ or ‘slave’). For example, we learn that the wergild of a wealh gafolgelda ‘a British tax-payer’ is 120 shillings; that of a wealh with five hides of land is 600 shillings³; and that of cyninges horswealh ‘the king’s horse-wealh’ is 200.⁴ There is a total of eight clauses which mention this group, concerning mostly wergeld levels and precedures around accusations.

These laws have intrigued scholars. Who were these wealas ‘Britons’? Were they British people drawn into the West Saxon sphere by territorial expansion or perhaps remnants of the Romano-British population in Wessex?⁵

The word englisc ‘English’ appears in some of these clauses too⁶ and presents just as many issues. What would be meant by this term used by a king of Wessex in the seventh century,long before we see other signs of a political sense of ‘the English’ or territorial organisation reflecting what would later be termed England?

More than anything, the wergelds prescribed for wealas have attracted attention because they are around half of the wergeld of the ‘English’ (which are 200 shillings for a normal freeman, 600 and 1200 for those with more land and for nobles).⁷ Some scholars have taken the wergeld disparity between Britons and the English to be a sign of the domination of the ‘Germanic’ West Saxons over the British, which squares with other evidence, such as the lack of influence of British language on Old English.

Bryan Ward-Perkins suggested it may have been an attempt to encourage assimilation of the British, given the monetary and social benefits of being part of the politically dominant group.⁸ Alex Woolf suggested that these clauses showed an ‘apartheid’ system in operation between a patchwork of separate regions of Britons and West Saxons, where the mechanism of lower wergelds would eventually lead to the transfer of money and property from Britons to West Saxons.⁹ Over time, this could explain the disappearance of Britons, genetically, culturally and linguistically.

Such theories about Britons in Ine – and thus about Britons in early Wessex, since we often extrapolate from the specific context of the laws to early Wessex more generally – appear relatively often.¹⁰ The evidence was even picked up by geneticists, in an article which uses the ‘apartheid-like society’ reflected by Ine’s laws as part of the framing of their genetic findings.¹¹

But these are grand theories built on shaky foundations. There are many issues with this evidence and scholars’ use of it.

Firstly, as mentioned, Ine might be a ninth-century translation of a seventh-century Latin original. This theory means that wealh/wilisc/wealas and englisc were not the words used in the original – they are ninth-century word choices. The words used in the original – and more importantly, the referents, i.e. the groups those words referred to – are unknown and unknowable.

A ninth-century translator is unlikely to have known the social, cultural and ethnic subtleties of seventh-century Wessex and may well have reached for terms that made sense in their own time. Famously, Alfred’s reign (in which Ine’s translation would have taken place) saw the active royal promotion of a concept of ‘the English’.

Even people who reject the translation theory have to acknowledge that the language and text of Ine’s code is so far removed from the original that we have to be deeply critical of reading too much into individual words like people have done in this case.

Secondly, it’s possible that Ine’s ethnic divides are imported, because there are equivalent laws in Pactus legis salicae (an early recension of Lex Salica), a Frankish code from the sixth century, which may well have been known in seventh-century Wessex.¹² This code contains a set of clauses that distinguish between a romanus and a francus/barbarus and, like in Ine, these laws also set lower wergelds for romani than franci.¹³

There are also some even closer parallels to Ine, since Pactus mentions, for instance, a romanus tributarius (§41.10) (the same as Ine’s wealh gafoldgylda) and romanus homo conviva regis (equivalent to Ine’s cyninges horswealh).¹⁴

The existence of these continental parllels hasn’t been entirely overlooked.¹⁵ But there is practically no discussion of the problems this poses for taking Ine’s laws at face value. What if the inclusion of these laws is a result of knowledge of Frankish law, which the West-Saxon king thought sounded like a good idea for his own kingdom, but which never actually made it into practice or reflected much of the realities on the ground? We don’t know enough about the making of legislation in early medieval England to say that such influences couldn’t have played a role.

Given the close connections between Frankish royals and ecclesiastics and the people involved in law-writing in Wessex in the seventh century, it is difficult to believe that these parallels – romanus/francus and wealh/englisc – are independent of each other. It may of course have been inspired or borrowed from Frankish law and still become actual West Saxon practice. But that would have to be argued, not assumed. It seems that Ine’s evidence has been so attractive that not enough critical attention has been paid to it.

And there is also the assumption which is so often involved in studies of Anglo-Saxon laws, especially the earliest ones, namely that the laws are native texts, part of an isolated national genre containing laws which are responding to or reflecting on-the-ground conditions (whether this means that laws were actually followed or not is a different question). But these early laws can and should be treated as textual genres that were open to influences from elsewhere.¹⁶

Whether Ine’s wealh clauses are a translation from Latin, borrowed from Frankish law or both, the upshot is that we don’t know what groups of people laws are referring to. We ought to be exceptionally careful before using them to infer the social conditions of seventh-century Wessex or to name particular ethnic group identities.

Of course, all early medieval sources are subject to doubt and the question is always how much of it we can accept. In the case of Ine, I would argue that it is so far from being straightforward as textual evidence that it can only be used with extreme caution. One way in which it should not be used is relying on individual words or clauses like this, especially in cases such as wealas/englisc where there is both a ninth-century context sowing suspicion (Alfredian promotion of ‘the English’) and a seventh-century continental one (existence of equivalent laws with equivalent terms in Lex Salica).

Given that this is a particularly sensitive issue which touches on questions of the emergence of English ethnicity, identity and ‘statehood’ – an area that has both modern and historical relevance – responsible use of evidence is even more important.