Reinhold Schmid, to whom the Archdeacon’s second referee referred, was Professor of Laws at Jena, and published at Leipzig in 1832 an edition of the “Anglo-Saxon Laws.” “This edition,” says Mr. Thorpe, “is a very creditable publication, decidedly superior to the preceding ones (_i.e._ Lambarde’s and Wilkins’s). The version is free from the gross errors of Wilkins and generally correct.”[193] This statement corroborates the independent testimony of the Archdeacon’s unnamed writer. IV. Lord Selborne’s eighth witness is Professor Freeman, of Oxford. “Mr. Freeman,” says Lord Selborne, “who seems to have accepted the date A.D. 1014 as evidence that the document represents some public act of that year, was also led to the conclusion that these were ‘hardly laws at all,’ but mere ‘advice,’ and an expression of pious and patriotic feeling, a promise of national amendment rather than legislation strictly so called.”[194] I shall give some extracts from Mr. Freeman’s letter written in 1885, directly referring to the Church Grith law, and then I shall contrast such opinions with those expressed on the same subject in the last edition of his “Norman Conquest,” published in 1877. The reader can then form his own conclusion with regard to the letter and the historical statement. “The only case” he says in his letter, “of the action of the State in the ancient laws is that to which I have referred in the laws of Ethelred.[195] Here the sixth enactment of 1014, under the head of Church Grith, clearly ordains the threefold division, and that with solemnity. “Here then at last we come to the threefold division of the tithe enjoined by secular as well as by ecclesiastical authority. _But something is wanting to make legislation perfect._ If we look on a little further to the next clause but one, we shall find a strict enactment about the payment of tithes, and not only an enactment, but _a means prescribed for carrying the enactment into force_. But this is simply copied from an earlier law of Edgar.[196] And in the law of 1014 it stands almost alone as a real piece of legislation with a sanction. In truth these laws, of which I have found something to say elsewhere,[197] _are hardly laws at all_. As was not wonderful, under the peculiar circumstances of the time, _they are rather an expression of pious and patriotic feeling_ (see the last clause), a kind of promise of national amendment than legislation, strictly so called. They go along with the discourses of Archbishop Elfric, _good advice rather than legislation_, rather than with those codes which not only make decrees, but provide means for executing them. In such a collection of recommendations rather than of real statutes we are not at all surprised to find the threefold division of tithe. But it is nowhere found in any of those codes which are real acts of legislation, providing the means for carrying out what is ordained, etc.”