This is really the logical sequence of Lord Selborne’s _inferential_
canon of criticism, as regards Lambarde’s omission of the Church Grith
law. The fact is that he, like Selden and Spelman, had never seen the law.
(4) Wheelock published a second edition of Lambarde’s “Laws” in 1644,
in which he added the laws of the Conqueror and of Henry I., but omitted
the laws of the Kentish kings. Why? Must the answer be according to Lord
Selborne’s canon of criticism, viz., that “he regarded them as not having
the character or the authority of laws”? No. He, like Lambarde, had not
seen the Kentish laws or the Church Grith law.
(5) John Johnson published a “Collection of the Laws and Canons of the
Church of England,” in 1720, mainly founded upon Spelman’s “Concilia.”
Mr. John Baron, in his new edition of Johnson’s collection, published
in 1850, says, “Mr. Thorpe publishes some ecclesiastical laws of King
Ethelred at pp. 129, 141, 145, which _were altogether unknown_ to
Johnson”[186] There is at p. 129 “Liber Constitutionum”; at p. 141 “Grith
and Mund”; at p. 145 “Church Grith.”
Mr. Baron’s edition is quoted probably one hundred times by Lord
Selborne in his “Facts and Fictions” and “Church Defence,” and he must
unquestionably have read Baron’s Prefatory statement that “Grith and
Mund” and “Church Grith laws” _were unknown_ to Johnson. Yet in the face
of that statement, Lord Selborne says, “If Lambarde, Wheelock, and John
Johnson were acquainted with either manuscript (_the contrary supposition
is improbable_), the inference is that they did not regard it (Grith law)
as having the character or the authority of a law.” I have taken these
five authors _seriatim_, and the general conclusion is that the Grith law
was unknown to each and all of them.
II. His sixth witness is Wilkins. Lord Selborne says:—
“David Wilkins was the first to publish the Church Grith in his ‘Leges
Anglo-Saxonica,’ where he combined it in a manner, for which the
manuscripts afforded no warrant, with the Ordinances of ‘Habam,’ etc. If
he had regarded it as an authentic ecclesiastical law when he afterwards
(in A.D. 1737) published his great collection of ‘Acts of Councils’ and
other English ecclesiastical documents, it must have found a place there,
which it does not.”[187]
Dr. Wilkins was also the first to publish the laws of the Kentish kings.
Mr. Thorpe says of Wilkins’s “Concilia,” “As a monument of industry this
edition is very creditable to Dr. Wilkins; at the same time it must,
though reluctantly, be acknowledged by every one competent to judge, that
as a translator of Anglo-Saxon he not unfrequently betrays an ignorance
even of its first principles, that though not unparalleled, is perfectly
astounding.”[188]
I shall now examine the above statement of Lord Selborne.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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