The "_second sanction_" required to give the legislation of the king and Witan the effect of law, was undoubtedly, I think, _as a general thing, the sanction of a jury_. I know of no evidence whatever that laws were ever submitted to popular vote in the county courts, as this author seems to suppose possible. Another mode, sometimes resorted to for obtaining the sanction of the people to the laws of the Witan, was, it seems, to persuade the people themselves to swear to observe them. Mackintosh says: "The preambles of the laws (of the Witan) speak of the infinite number of _liegemen_ who attended, as only applauding the measures of the assembly. But this applause was neither so unimportant to the success of the measures, nor so precisely distinguished from a share in legislation, as those who read history with a modern eye might imagine. It appears that under Athelstan expedients were resorted to, to obtain a consent to the law from great bodies of the people in their districts, which their numbers rendered impossible in a national assembly. That monarch appears to have sent commissioners to hold _shire-gemotes_ or county meetings, where they proclaimed the laws made by the king and his counsellors, which, being acknowledged and sworn to at these _folk-motes_ (meetings of the people) became, by their assent, completely binding on the whole nation."--_Mackintosh's Hist. of England_, _Ch._ 2. _45 Lardner's Cab. Cyc._, 75.] [Footnote 38: Page 31.] [Footnote 39: Hallam says, "It was, however, to the county court that an English freeman chiefly looked for the maintenance of his civil rights."--_2 Middle Ages_, 392. Also, "This (the county court) was the great constitutional judicature in all questions of civil right."--_Ditto_, 395. Also, "The liberties of these Anglo-Saxon thanes were chiefly secured, next to their swords and their free spirits, by the inestimable right of deciding civil and criminal suits in their own county courts."--_Ditto_, 399.] [Footnote 40: "Alfred may, in one sense, be called the founder of these laws, (the Saxon,) for until his time they were an unwritten code, but he expressly says, '_that I, Alfred, collected the good laws of our forefathers into one code, and also I wrote them down_'--which is a decisive fact in the history of our laws well worth noting."--_Introduction to Gilbert's History of the Common Pleas_, p. 2, _note_. Kelham says, "Let us consult our own lawyers and historians, and they will tell us * * that Alfred, Edgar, and Edward the Confessor, were the great _compilers and restorers_ of the English Laws."--_Kelham's Preliminary Discourse to the Laws of William the Conqueror_, p. 12. _Appendix to Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman Language._