King Alfred’s Book of Laws: A Study of the Domboc and Its Influence on English Identity by todd Preston (review)

The title of the volume under review is something of a misnomer: although it professes to be a study of “King Alfred’s Book of Laws,” the legislation compiled by Alfred and his advisors receives only a few pages of discussion. Nor do the laws of Ine, which Alfred appended to the end of his legislation and which comprise a significant proportion of the Domboc as a whole, receive any sustained attention. Rather, the focus of Todd Preston’s new study is what he calls the “Alfredian theory of law” (p. 15) articulated in the Mosaic and apostolic preface to the main text. It is in this focus that the principal contribution of Preston’s volume lies: as Preston notes, Alfred’s legislation is too often overlooked, if not by legal historians familiar with Felix Liebermann’s magisterial edition then by readers of the writings produced under the king’s supervision who have less experience reckoning with Liebermann’s considerable idiosyncrasies as an editor. In bringing the preface of Alfred’s legislation to the fore, Preston highlights the extent to which a sustained analysis of the decisions made by the translator of its Mosaic and apostolic passages can illuminate the understandings of cultural identity standing behind the compilation of the Domboc itself. Arguing that the Domboc serves as “a document that is continually used as part of a project to reconfigure an English/Anglo-Saxon national identity that is both drawn from the past even as it is shaped by contemporary circumstance” (p. 6), Preston’s volume illustrates how a renewed conception of the preface as literature, rather than simply a workmanlike exercise in translation, can open up new avenues of study for an underread text.

Preston spends his first two chapters developing what he argues is the theory of law underlying the Mosaic and apostolic preface. The opening chapter compares the depiction of Moses in the Old English poem Exodus with that in the Domboc preface in order to examine how each illustrates “the intersection of kingship, law, and national identity in ninth-century Wessex” (p. 15). Although there is no evidence that the Old English Exodus was read at Alfred’s court—and, indeed, it is unclear why Preston should choose this depiction of Moses over others that survive from Anglo-Saxon England—Preston asserts that “the OE Exodus can provide a helpful insight into the Anglo-Saxon perception of Moses’ role as a human intermediary for God and, by extension, into how Alfred may have been employing this pivotal figure as both a sacred and secular model of leadership” (p. 22). According to Preston, the preface’s subsequent reworking of Matthew 15:17 and Acts 15:23–29 enables Alfred to combine this self-portrayal as a Mosaic lawgiver with a similarly ambitious comparison between himself and Christ: “Alfred mirrors Christ’s approach to law, making plain the tie between the two lawgivers and furthering his ideological agenda to cast his own rule as that over God’s chosen people: just as Christ adapts Mosaic law for the Christians, so Alfred adapts Mosaic law for the Anglo-Saxons” (p. 25).

The second chapter, “Reading the Laws,” claims to offer “a close reading of the Domboc” in order to show “Alfred’s kingship and kingdom to be more than a pale reflection of his Carolingian neighbors, but a distinctive amalgamation of native Christian and secular cultures” (p. 35). The promised close reading is largely absent, however: Preston spends a mere three pages of the chapter on Alfred’s laws and discusses only clauses 1–1.8. Instead, Preston returns to the Mosaic preface in order to examine the interplay between Biblical concepts of mercy and Anglo-Saxon notions of bot. Preston points out that the preface’s translation of Exodus omits the...