It is important to note that King Alfred placed a long Scriptural preface to his secular laws. He began with the ten commandments, translated and transposed them in a strange manner. It is all in Anglo-Saxon, which Alfred had translated from the Vulgate which they taught him at Rome when there in his younger days. The passage quoted from Spelman is taken from Exodus xxii. 29, and this is in Alfred’s Scriptural preface to his laws. The Vulgate translation is, “Decimas tuas et primitias tuas non tardabis reddere.” [“Thou shalt not delay to give thy tithes and firstfruits.”] The renderings of this passage in the Septuagint, Vulgate, and English Bible, are _paraphrases_ and _not translations_ of the Hebrew text. For example, “Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits and of thy liquors.”[114] Again, “Thou shalt not delay to offer from thy abundance and of thy liquors.”[115] This passage in his preface was not one of his laws on tithes, as Prideaux states. “In King Alfred’s laws,” says Lord Selborne, “there is nothing about tithes. He made a treaty of peace with Guthrum; in that treaty there was nothing about tithes.”[116] I quote his lordship because recently the Rev. M. Fuller has dedicated “Our Title Deeds” to him. Should his lordship take the trouble to read through that book, he would be astonished at some of the statements made in it; _e.g._, Mr. Fuller says that King Ethelbert of Kent passed laws for the payment of tithes, and that King Alfred passed a law for their payment, quoting, of course, for the second case, Dean Prideaux, who has misled so many on the subject of tithes. “In a code of laws,” says Mr. Fuller, “published during Alfred’s reign, he in one of them strictly enjoins the payment of these tithes to the Church.”[117] And adds, “In this Digest of the laws of his predecessors, Alfred made not a _new_ law for tithes; he merely copied from them whose laws have long since been lost.”[118] Now, the only reference to tithes in Alfred’s laws is the above quotation, which he made in his preface from the Vulgate translation of Exodus xxii. 29. “No legislative enactment,” says Mr. Kemble, “can be shown on the subject of tithes in the codes of Alfred, Ini, or the Kentish kings.”[119] “It is not easy to say,” says Johnson, “with what view Alfred put this Scriptural preface to his laws, if it were not to show his great esteem for God’s word. There is no hint given that he expected his people should make the judicial precepts of Moses the rule of their action,”[120] etc.