"He (Alfred) also, like another Theodosius, _collected the various customs_ that he found dispersed in the kingdom, and reduced and digested them into one uniform system, or code of laws, in his _som-bec_, or _liber judicialis_ (judicial book). This he _compiled_ for the use of the court baron, hundred and county court, the court-leet and sheriff's tourn, tribunals which he established for the trial of all causes, civil and criminal, in the very districts wherein the complaints arose."--_4 Blackstone_, 411. Alfred himself says, "Hence I, King Alfred, gathered these together, and commanded many of those to be written down which our forefathers observed--those which I liked--and those which I did not like, by the advice of my Witan, I threw aside. For I durst not venture to set down in writing over many of my own, since I knew not what among them would please those that should come after us. But those which I met with either of the days of me, my kinsman, or of Offa, King of Mercia, or of Æthelbert, who was the first of the English who received baptism--those which appeared to me the justest--I have here collected, and abandoned the others. Then I, Alfred, King of the West Saxons, showed these to all my Witan, and they then said that they were all willing to observe them."--_Laws of Alfred, translated by R. Price, prefixed to Mackintosh's History of England_, _vol._ 1. _45 Lardner's Cab. Cyc._ "King Edward * * projected and begun what his grandson, King Edward the Confessor, afterwards completed, viz., one uniform digest or body of laws to be observed throughout the whole kingdom, _being probably no more than a revival of King Alfred's code_, with some improvements suggested by necessity and experience, particularly the incorporating some of the British, or, rather, Mercian _customs_, and also _such of the Danish_ (customs) as were reasonable and approved, into the _West Saxon Lage_, which was still the ground-work of the whole. And this appears to be the best supported and most plausible conjecture, (for certainty is not to be expected,) of the rise and original of that admirable system of maxims and unwritten customs which is now known by the name of the _common law_, as extending its authority universally over all the realm, and which is doubtless of Saxon parentage."--_4 Blackstone_, 412. "By the _Lex Terræ_ and _Lex Regni_ is understood the laws of Edward the Confessor, confirmed and enlarged as they were by William the Conqueror; and this Constitution or Code of Laws is what even to this day are called '_The Common Law of the Land_.'"--_Introduction to Gilbert's History of the Common Pleas_, p. 22, _note_.] [Footnote 41: Not the conqueror of the English people, (as the friends of liberty maintain,) but only of Harold the usurper.--See _Hale's History of the Common Law_, ch. 5.] [Footnote 42: For all these codes see Wilkins' Laws of the Anglo-Saxons.