Early English Laws is an open access platform providing new editions and translations of all English legal codes, edicts, and treatises produced up to the time of Magna Carta, in 1215.
Early English Laws was created by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London and the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. It is a project to digitise all manuscripts of English legal codes, edicts, and treatises up to Magna Carta (1215) and to edit or re-edit and translate early legal texts.
Early English Laws is now hosted by the University of St Andrews.
Content
Early English Laws provides the standard editions of English legal texts by Felix Liebermann and William Stubbs, as well as new editions, translations, and commentary. Each document has a synopsis in English; some also have scholarly introductions. More than 150 individual texts are included, from Æthelberht of Kent’s code (c. 600) onwards.
The legal texts are available as images of the original documents. The synopses and introductions of the documents are provided in HTML format.
Searching
The list of texts can be filtered by title key words, category or king.
Browsing
The texts are listed alphabetically by title.
Accessibility
View Early English Laws accessibility information
Early English Laws is partially compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Most of the texts are provided as images of the original documents and are not fully accessible. The images are displayed in an image viewer which allows for extensive zooming. A small number of texts are also available in HTML format. Synopses and introductions are also provided in HTML format.