o the deed an imprecation on all such as should be
guilty of that crime [l].
[FN [1] Hickes, Dissert. Epist.]

Among a people, who lived in so simple a manner as the Anglo-Saxons,
the judicial power is always of greater importance than the
legislative. There were few or no taxes imposed by the states; there
were few statutes enacted; and the nation was less governed by laws
than by customs, which admitted a great latitude of interpretation.
Though it should therefore be allowed that the Wittenagemot was
altogether composed of the principal nobility, the county courts,
where all the freeholders were admitted, and which regulated all the
daily occurrences of life, formed a wide basis for the government, and
were no contemptible checks on the aristocracy. But there is another
power still more important than either the judicial or legislative; to
wit, the power of injuring or serving by immediate force and violence,
for which it is difficult to obtain redress in courts of justice. In
all extensive governments, where the execution of the laws is feeble,
this power naturally falls into the hands of the principal nobility;
and the degree of it which prevails cannot be determined so much by
the public statutes, as by small incidents in history, by particular
customs, and sometimes by the reason and nature of things. The
Highlands of Scotland have long been entitled by law to every
privilege of British subjects; but it was not till very lately that
the common people could in fact enjoy these privileges.

The powers of all the members of the Anglo-Saxon government are
disputed among historians and antiquaries; the extreme obscurity of
the subject, even though faction had never entered into the question,
would naturally have begotten those controversies. But the great
influence of the lords over their slaves and tenants, the clientship
of the burghers, the total want of a middling rank of men, the extent
of the monarchy, the loose execution of the laws, the continued
disorders and convulsions of the state; all these circumstances evince
that the Anglo-Saxon government became at last extremely
aristocratical; and the events, during the period immediately
preceding the conquest, confirm this inference or conjecture.

[MN Criminal law.]
Both the punishments inflicted by the Anglo-Saxon courts of
judicature, and the methods of proof employed in all causes, appear
somewhat singular, and are very different from those which prev