Dr. Lingard’s opinion is valuable upon this point. “It was probably thought,” he says, “that a law so precise (as Edgar’s), and so severe—a forfeiture of eight-tenths of the crop—would insure for the future the exact payment of the tithe; but its subsequent re-enactment in the reign of Ethelred,[215] and again in the reign of Canute, will justify a suspicion that in many places its provisions were set at defiance, and in many but imperfectly enforced.”[216] Mr. Fuller, in “Our Title-Deeds,” regards Dr. Lingard’s silence about the Church Grith law as “inexplicable in every way.” The above quotation, as regards this law, clearly proves the charge to be groundless. As Bromton had copied his Anglo-Saxon laws from the old Latin version, he has not fourteen of the fifteen laws which were omitted in that version.[217] “It may be asserted,” says Lord Selborne, “without risk of error, that _no part_ of the Worcester volume, Nero, A. 1 of the Cottonian collection was written before the end of Cnute’s reign, who died in 1035, for the volume begins with Cnute’s laws, which are followed by those of Edgar, Alfred, Athelstan, Edmund, Ethelred; and after them Grith and Mund, and Church Grith:—all in Anglo-Saxon, _without break_, and in that order.”[218] Every reader of “Facts and Fictions” cannot consult the Worcester volume to judge for himself whether this statement is correct or not. Readers generally accept as true what men of position and education publish, without investigating—for they have not time—the truth of the subject-matter. Mr. Fuller makes the following candid admission: “In Thorpe’s ‘Anglo-Saxon Laws,’ i. 342, the tripartite division _seems expressly sanctioned by law_; it will be therefore necessary for us to investigate this important fact, and see _if it is not possible to shake its authority and bearing on the case_.”[219] This is exactly the spirit with which certain writers attack the law. Let us test the above quotation from “Facts and Fictions.” The volume contains 184 folios quarto. Folios 1 to 39 form the first tract in the volume; 42 to 56 the second; 57 to 68_b_ the third; 71 to 97_b_ the fourth, etc.