orders, or laws, and, in
order to gain them a reverence, would prove that they were as old as the
nation; and to support that opinion, they put to the torture all the
ancient monuments. Others, pushing things further, have offered a still
greater violence to them. N. Bacon, in order to establish his
republican, system, has so distorted all the evidence he has produced,
concealed so many things of consequence, and thrown such false colors
upon the whole argument, that I know no book so likely to mislead the
reader in our antiquities, if yet it retains any authority. In reality,
that ancient Constitution and those Saxon laws make little or nothing
for any of our modern parties, and, when fairly laid open, will be found
to compose such a system as none, I believe, would think it either
practicable or desirable to establish. I am sensible that nothing has
been, a larger theme of panegyric with, all our writers on politics and
history than the Anglo-Saxon government; and it is impossible not to
conceive an high, opinion of its laws, if we rather consider what is
said of them than what they visibly are. These monuments of our pristine
rudeness still subsist; and they stand out of themselves indisputable
evidence to confute the popular declamations of those writers who would
persuade us that the crude institutions of an unlettered people had
reached a perfection which the united efforts of inquiry, experience,
learning, and necessity have not been able to attain in many ages.

But the truth is, the present system of our laws, like our language and
our learning, is a very mixed and heterogeneous mass: in some respects
our own; in more borrowed from the policy of foreign, nations, and
compounded, altered, and variously modified, according to the various
necessities which the manners, the religion, and the commerce of the
people have at different times imposed. It is our business, in some
measure, to follow and point out these changes and improvements: a task
we undertake, not from any ability for the greatness of such a work, but
purely to give some short and plain account of these matters to the very
ignorant.

The Law of the Romans seems utterly to have expired in this island
together with their empire, and that, too, before the Saxon
establishment. The Anglo-Saxons came into England as conquerors. They
brought their own customs with them, and doubtless did not take laws
from, but imposed theirs upon, the people they had van