It covers a diverse range of subjects, including ecclesiastical cases, treason, murder, theft, feuds, assessment of danegeld, and the amounts of judicial fines.
[1][2] It was part of a small group of similar writings devoted to legal procedures that were written for royal administrators.
[6] It also draws upon non-English sources, including Isidore of Seville and Ivo of Chartres, as well as legal codes such as Frankish and canon law.
[9] The Leges was probably part of a project including the Quadripartitus, the two works being part of a planned work in four volumes to cover not only the laws of the writer's own time but previous laws of the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, as well as how to handle legal cases.
It gained that name from the inscription "De libertate ecclesie et totius Anglie obseruanda leges Henrici primi" which occurs on five of the six extant manuscripts.
[15] The work is not a law code issued by King Henry but a compilation of already extant legislation that was still current during his reign.
It begins with Henry's Charter of Liberties, which he issued after his coronation, and this is the only actual legal document reproduced in the Leges.
The rest of the treatise is concerned with non-ecclesiastical subjects, including cases of injury, theft, murder, and feuds.
[2] Other royal cases involved counterfeiters or false judgement,[17] or violent acts against the king himself or his household and servants.
[2] The work assumes that the royal legal system would still address some issues that later would have been dealt with by ecclesiastical courts.
[25] The Leges also devoted some effort to the theory of the law and attempted to make generalisations about legal procedures and practices.
It was used by David Wilkins to compile his 1721 work Leges Anglo-Saxonicae as well by Henry Spelman to correct manuscripts used in the Epistola Eleutherii.
It appears to have belonged to the London grouping, and may have been Gi rather than a separate manuscript, although Spelman's description and usage is unclear as to which possibility is most likely.
The other possible manuscript was one that Wilkins referred to as "quod iudetur fuisse Archiepiscopi aut Monachorum Cantuar", but it has not been found in searches of Lambeth Palace Library or the various Canterbury repositories.
Prior to this, two other scholars, William Lambarde and Spelman, had intended to produce printed editions of the Leges, but were unable to follow through on the project.
A portion of the Leges had earlier appeared in Edward Coke's Institutes of the Laws of England in 1628.
Another edition appeared in 1721, with Wilkins' publication of the Leges Anglo-Saxonicae, which built on the work of William Somner between 1645 and 1652.
An edition was published along with other 12th-century legal treatises, in the Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, and more recently, it has been studied by the historian L. J.
[10] The historian Patrick Wormald says of the Leges that it "has had more effect on views of English law before Henry II than any other".
[36] It was cited in the 2022 United States Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization by Justice Samuel Alito.