Out of theſe three laws, Roger Hoveden[1] and Ranulphus Ceſtrenſis[2] inform us, king Edward the confeſſor extracted one uniform law or digeſt of laws, to be obſerved throughout the whole kingdom; though Hoveden and the author of an old manuſcript chronicle[3] aſſure us likewiſe, that this work was projected and begun by his grandfather king Edgar. And indeed a general digeſt of the ſame nature has been conſtantly found expedient, and therefore put in practice by other great nations, which were formed from an aſſemblage of little provinces, governed by peculiar cuſtoms. As in Portugal, under king Edward, about the beginning of the fifteenth century[4]. In Spain under Alonzo X, who about the year 1250 executed the plan of his father St. Ferdinand, and collected all the provincial cuſtoms into one uniform law, in the celebrated code entitled las partidas[5]. And in Sweden, about the ſame aera, a univerſal body of common law was compiled out of the particular cuſtoms eſtabliſhed by the laghman of every province, and intitled the land’s lagh, being analagous to the common law of England[6].
Both theſe undertakings, of king Edgar and Edward the confeſſor, ſeem to have been no more than a new edition, or freſh promulgation, of Alfred’s code or dome-book, with ſuch additions and improvements as the experience of a century and an half had ſuggeſted. For Alfred is generally ſtiled by the ſame hiſtorians the legum Anglicanarum conditor, as Edward the confeſſor is the reſtitutor. Theſe however are the laws which our hiſtories ſo often mention under the name of the laws of Edward the confeſſor; which our anceſtors ſtruggled ſo hardly to maintain, under the firſt princes of the Norman line; and which ſubſequent princes ſo frequently promiſed to keep and to reſtore, as the moſt popular act they could do, when preſſed by foreign emergencies or domeſtic diſcontents. Theſe are the laws, that
