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From Bible to Law in the Early Middle Ages. Adaptations of the Old Testament in the Collectio Hibernensis and King Alfred’s Law-Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2025

ROY FLECHNER
ROY FLECHNER*
Affiliation:
University College, Dublin
*
E-mail: roy.flechner@ucd.ie
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Abstract

Two law books of the early Middle Ages stand out for their heavy reliance on the Old Testament, which was rarely quoted in legal texts of the period. The Irish Hibernensis and King Alfred’s Domboc drew not only on the Old Testament itself, but also on adapted biblical verses. An investigation into the literary roots of these legal compilations uncovers parabiblical material which formed part of a literate discourse that spanned Ireland, Wessex and Reims, raising questions about the extent to which contemporary scholars regarded the Bible as a fixed and immutable text.

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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , First View , pp. 1 - 24
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Law books from the early medieval Latin West seldom quote at length from the Old Testament. This article is concerned with two important exceptions: the late seventh- or early eighth-century Collectio Hibernensis and King Alfred’s law-book or Domboc, dating from the last decade of the ninth century.Footnote 1 Not only is the volume of biblical quotations in the Hibernensis and the Domboc high, but so is the proportion that these quotations constitute of the overall texts. The so-called ‘biblical introduction’ to the Domboc comprises about a quarter of the entire law book. In the Hibernensis, where the biblical quotations are not concentrated in one place but spread out, there are at least 838 direct quotations from the Bible, of which 495 are from the Old Testament and 343 from the New Testament. In addition there are at least 433 paraphrases of the biblical text and numerous allusions to the Bible.Footnote 2 The Bible can of course play an important role in a legal text even when it is quoted sparsely. Some Carolingian capitularies are cases in point.Footnote 3 But when biblical quotations are rife, then they afford us the opportunity to study law books also as witnesses to the reception of the Old Testament as a text of normative import.Footnote 4 This reception can be traced through verbatim quotations, paraphrases, adaptations of the biblical text and interpretations of the biblical text.

The choice to concentrate on the Hibernensis and the Domboc is premised not only on their heavy dependence on the Old Testament (heavier than any other Latin Christian law text except derivatives of the Hibernensis) but also on the predilection that they both exhibit for drawing on adapted biblical material, or material that underwent ‘sweeping changes’, as Stefan Jurasinski and Lisi Oliver put it in relation to the Domboc. Footnote 5 The similarities between the Hibernensis and the Domboc may not be coincidental. They may testify to either a debt to certain common sources or to a direct dependence by the Domboc on the Hibernensis. Footnote 6 A similar relationship has been postulated in regard to the laws of Wihtræd (d. 725), some of which may be indebted either to the Hibernensis or to its sources.Footnote 7 The possibility that some adapted biblical verses go back to a common source (or common sources) is of particular importance for adding to our knowledge of the manner in which the Bible was received in early medieval Britain and in Ireland, where the prominence accorded the Old Testament has long been noted by historians.Footnote 8 It invites us to ask why compilers of law books in Britain and Ireland were receptive to incorporating parabiblical texts, exegetical texts and non-Vulgate texts of the Old Testament into their works and to what extent this habit inflected their legal thinking. With a view to addressing these questions, the present article will open with two essential introductions: to the practice of adapting the Bible and to the two law books at the centre of the discussion.

The rewritten Bible

The field of study concerned with adaptations of the Bible is commonly known as the ‘Rewritten Bible’, after an expression first coined by Géza Vermes in 1961.Footnote 9 A convenient definition can be found in the Oxford Dictionary of the Bible, where the Rewritten Bible is said to be a ‘term used for writings which amplify, modify, or in some other way revise existing books of the Old Testament, thus making them more relevant or acceptable to a later generation of readers’.Footnote 10 First and foremost among such writings are some biblical books themselves. The best examples are Deuteronomy, which elaborates on the previous three books of the Pentateuch, and 1–2 Chronicles, which elaborate on the books of Samuel, Kings and others. Some deuterocanonical books, like Jubilees, Baruch and Enoch, are also included in this definition, insofar as they relay biblical narratives. Then there are variations on biblical themes which never made it into any canon, like the Temple Scroll, Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical antiquities, and Josephus’ Antiquities. Footnote 11 The latter may have been the most widely-circulating Rewritten Bible of the early Middle Ages.Footnote 12 Written by a Hellenised Jew, it is one of a number of Rewritten Bibles that transmitted Jewish traditions into the Middle Ages. Some Aramaic translations (targumim) of the Bible may also count as Rewritten Bibles in their own right, especially the Pseudo-Jonathan targum, which combines translation with much commentary and interpretative narrative (aggadic) material.Footnote 13 However, the texts that form the largest category of Rewritten Bibles are the numerous midrashim, notoriously difficult to date and provenance.Footnote 14 As we shall see, a midrashic tale is echoed also in the Hibernensis. However, as with many other similarities between Jewish and Christian works, the route by which this tale reached the compilers of the Hibernensis (or entered the Christian literary tradition in the first place) remains unknown. As observed by Johannes Heil and Sumi Shimahara in relation to other such texts: ‘we find striking parallels to medieval Jewish interpretations in terms of content, and at times even wording, that are neither assigned as borrowings from a specific author, nor necessarily stem from a written source’.Footnote 15 In other words, the parallels are certain, but the routes of transmission are uncertain.

Rewritten Bibles can also be found among texts from Insular Europe. Vernacular paraphrases on biblical books include the Anglo-Saxon Books of Exodus and Judith (not to be confused with Ælfric’s Judith),Footnote 16 which are re-cast as heroic epics, and there is a short Anglo-Saxon paraphrase of the Book of Daniel.Footnote 17 Around the time that the Old English Hexateuch was reaching completion, in the late tenth century, Ireland saw the composition of the Saltair na Rann, consisting of 150 cantos covering creation to the resurrection.Footnote 18 This was not the only Irish text of its kind. An Irish apocryphal text, recently translated by John Carey, the ninth- or tenth-century In Tenga Bithnúa ‘Ever New Tongoue’, from the Book of Lismore, is an elaborate retelling of creation which anticiaptes the day of judgement, as described in a revelation to the Apostle Philip.Footnote 19 Owing to the fact that the text revolves around a revelation it resembles early Jewish apocryphal texts, like the Book of Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, and the Book of Enoch. But its New Testament setting places it firmly within the Irish apocryphal tradition, which rehearses almost exclusively New Testament themes.Footnote 20 The presence of parabiblical works in the early medieval Insular world offers a certain context for the admission of adapted biblical verses in both the Hibernensis and the Domboc. At the very least it attests the existence of an intellectual milieu to which the idea of adapted biblical verses would not have been alien.

The earliest surviving work in Insular Europe which is known to have made use of adapted verses is Gildas’s De excidio Britanniae. Footnote 21 The work is replete with biblical quotations and allusions: of the 373 which have been recorded, 277 cite the Old Testament and 96 cite the New Testament.Footnote 22 Thomas O’Loughlin argued that Gildas himself adapted at least twenty-eight verses: seventeen from the Old Testament (Genesis, 1 Samuel, 2 Kings, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea) and the remainder from the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Hebrews).Footnote 23 The majority of changes are trivial and are frequently grammatical, for example: rendering a verse in indirect speech. Some of the more minor adaptations may be the result of quoting from memory. While ten of Gildas’s so-called ‘Fragments’ were drawn upon by the compilers of the Hibernensis, attempts to show that the compilers knew also his De excidio remain inconclusive.Footnote 24

The Hibernensis, the Domboc and their uses of the Bible

The Hibernensis is by far the most comprehensive of the early systematic canonical collections and it is the only collection to apply methods derived from biblical exegesis as tools for interpreting law and for making laws.Footnote 25 The Hibernensis was compiled in Ireland between 690 and 748.Footnote 26 Its compilers might have been Ruben (d. 725) of Dairinis (in the south of Ireland) and Cú Chuimne (d. 747) of Iona (in the northernmost reaches of the Irish-speaking world), who are mentioned at the end of a ninth-century manuscript copy of the text, now Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, ms lat. 12021. The text survives in two recensions, commonly called the A-Recension and B-Recension. It has been transmitted exclusively in manuscripts from continental Europe, dating from the mid-eighth century and later. In addition to seven survivng complete copies there are numerous incomplete copies, fragments and derivatives. No copy survives from Ireland. The impact of either recension of the Hibernensis on the development of the European canonical tradition can be measured not only by its wide dissemination across Europe, but also by the presence of quotations from the Hibernensis in many other texts, incuding Alcuin’s correspondence, Pope Leo iv’s correspondence, the Corbie recension of the Collectio Vetus Gallica, the decisions of the Council of Tribur 895, Oda of Canterbury’s Constitutiones, Wulfstan of York’s Canonical Collection and the laws of Hywel Dda.Footnote 27

Structurally, the Hibernensis is a systematic compilation divided into books (between sixty-five and sixty-nine in different manuscripts) and chapters, in which the material is organised according to theme. Themes range from typical concerns of canonical collections (like the ecclesiastical hierarchy, appropriate behaviour expected of clerics and monks, church property and almsgiving) to less typical matters (like kingship, divination, dietary restrictions and the nature of law itself). The thematic range of the Hibernensis and the wide variety of sources that it employs have been interpreted variously as an attempt to create a law code for a Christian society or as a text of Christian jurisprudence for instructing judges.Footnote 28

Among its sources are many that may be considered conventional to canonical collections, like the decisions of church councils (African, Gallic, Irish) and the pronouncements of popes (technically ‘decretals’).Footnote 29 But it also introduced new types of sources to the ordinary canonical roster. First among them was the Bible, quoted from both the Vulgate and Vetus Latina. Crucially, the collection is witness also to more inventive uses of the Bible which included adapted verses and spurious attributions to the Bible. Such inventive uses, of which there are numerous examples, can be classified under three principal categories:Footnote 30 first, casual and usually minor changes to the biblical text, additions to the biblical text, or omissions from the biblical text; second, spurious attributions to the Bible; and third, texts attributed to the Bible which were outright fabricated.

Parabiblical material in the Hibernensis serves much the same purpose as genuine biblical verses do: it was deployed in order to lend support to rules or provide examples of instances in which rules were followed.Footnote 31 Curiously, the compilers of the Hibernensis sometimes chose parabiblical texts even when genuine biblical verses were available for making the exact same point. Examples of this are texts on lot-casting excerpted from Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos but spuriously attributed to the Bible. These excerpts were quoted alongside genuine biblical verses concerning lot-casting.Footnote 32 Clearly, then, biblical and parabiblical verses could be used as alternatives but it is not possible to say why the compilers chose to deploy them in this way.

Other types of sources introduced by the Hibernensis include Greek and Latin Church Fathers (like Basil, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine), Christian historians (like Eusebius and Orosius), monastic authors (like Cassian and Benedict), gnomic literature (like the Prouerbia Grecorum), hagiography (like the Vitas patrum and the Life of Patrick by Muirchú), biblical commentaries (by Ambrose, Pelagius, Cassiodorus, Iunilius and Jerome, among others), miscellaneous late antique works (like Isidore’s Etymologies and De officiis, Gregory the Great’s Dialogues) and finally various British (Vinnian, Gildas), Anglo-Saxon (Aldhelm, Theodore) and Irish (Adomnán, Cumméne) authors. Altogether, the Hibernensis quotes 105 texts by forty-one authors who can be identified. It also quotes from twenty-nine texts that are considered anonymous, either because the authors to whom they were originally attributed are not known or because these texts were never attributed to specific authors in the first place (for example the acta of church councils).

The biblical introduction to the Domboc

The Domboc is a legal compilation in Old English from the 880s or 890s comprising 120 chapters, which draw to an extent on the enactments of previous kings: Æthelberht (Kent), Offa (Mercia) and Ine (Wessex). The Domboc is, in fact, the only witness to Ine’s laws, which were incorporated into it, and to Offa’s, which might never have been transmitted as a coherent law book. The extent to which Alfred was himself directly involved as author or compiler has never been established with certainty despite the confidence with which some historians have argued the case for and against. Influential voices on polar ends of the debate were Patrick Wormald, who argued for definite authorship by Alfred, and Malcolm Godden, who believed that the ‘law-code, like all other early medieval law-codes, was written by others in the king’s name and with his authority’.Footnote 33 Current scholarly opinion deems the question of authorship unanswerable. As remarked by the most recent editors of the Domboc, Jurasinski and Oliver: ‘[t]he mood of scholarship is, at present, such that few will risk being too precise about the nature of [Alfred’s] involvement in any of the texts attributed to him’.Footnote 34 For present purposes it is accepted that the Domboc is the product of the court at Wessex during Alfred’s reign but the question of the king’s direct involvement in the compilatory process has no direct bearing on the issues examined here.

The portion of the text with which this study is concerned is the biblical introduction. This comprises a translation into Old English of eighty-one verses from Exodus xx–xxiii, beginning with the Decalogue. This Old Testament translation is followed by a rather free rendering of the so-called Apostolic Council of Jerusalem from Acts xv. It is at that council that the ritual laws of the Old Testament were pronounced obsolete and only four prohibitions were retained: sacrifices, fornication, blood and suffocated animals. The biblical introduction is followed by the law code proper. However, the verses in the introduction do not seem to correspond directly to any clause in the law code; none is quoted or echoed in the code.Footnote 35 Why, then, were they prefixed to the code and what is their relationship to it?

There seems to be an agreement that the biblical introduction was intended to lay an ideological foundation to the law book, focusing attention on certain principles that underpinned the laws, in particular fairness, mercy and redress by compensation. Felix Liebermann believed that the biblical verses were placed at the beginning of the law book in order to display the high standards to which the laws aspired.Footnote 36 Developing this idea, Michael Wallace-Hadrill saw the biblical verses as forming a moral and jurisprudential preamble for the laws that followed in the Domboc. Footnote 37 Richard Dammery, in discussing changes made by the Old English translation to the underlying Latin biblical text, concludes that the verses were intended to underscore the value of justice and to ‘constrain those prone to partisan decisions’.Footnote 38 Michael Treschow suggests that the verses’ recurrent appeal to compensation rather than corporal punishment stresses mercy as an essential quality of the law.Footnote 39 In this respect they may be seen to anticipate the Domboc’s lists of personal injury tariffs, which have been argued by Tom Lambert to exhibit a combination of oral and written traditions.Footnote 40 David Pratt and Stefan Jurasinski – in separate publications – note Alfred’s belief in the importance of judging according to written law and they highlight the way in which the Domboc reinforced and justified this belief by an appeal to biblical precedent. The Domboc could therefore portray itself as the most recent in an evolving line of divine law-giving, which began with the Ten Commandments.Footnote 41 None of these views are mutually exclusive and they all suggest different (and sometimes subtle) ways in which the biblical introduction can be said to articulate with the main body of the Domboc, consisting of the laws themselves.

Adapting the Bible: key examples from the Domboc and the Hibernensis

The Domboc’s biblical introduction adapts the biblical text freely into Old English by adding and omitting words and phrases, by changing the order of phrases, modifying tenses and changing plurals into singulars. Unlike the Hibernensis, the biblical introduction does not have texts spuriously attributed to the Bible. Many of the adaptations in the biblical introduction are highlighted in Liebermann’s edition and others are listed by Dammery.Footnote 42 Below are examples of changes, with commentary.

In rendering the law of the Jubilee (Exodus xxi.2–30) according to which a Hebrew slave should be freed after six years of service, the biblical introduction (§11) replaced ‘Hebrew slave’ with ‘Christian slave’. A distant precedent for this change is noted by Gerda Heydemann in the General Capitulary for the Missi (802), where the word ‘Christian’ is substituted for the word ‘Israel’ in the Deuteronomic phrase, ‘to purge the evil from the midst of Israel’.Footnote 43 Further in the same clause, another verse concerning the freeing of slaves (Exodus xxi.5) is augmented by declaring the right of slaves to refuse to depart without their possessions. David Pelteret suggested that the augmentation may echo an (otherwise unattested) English rule that allowed slaves to accumulate moveable property.Footnote 44

On the matter of sick-maintenance the biblical introduction (§16) follows Exodus xxi.18–19 in requiring that an injured man, who is in the process of healing, should be compensated by the perpetrator. However, instead of simply covering the losses incurred from being unable to work and from having to pay for a physician, the biblical introduction stipulates that the physician be supplied by the perpetrator, who is required also to perform the work of the injured while he is incapacitated. There are precedents for this in Irish law, but no evidence for dependence.Footnote 45 However, another Anglo-Saxon text, the tenth-century Sriftboc, which contains a clause on sick-maintenance, has been argued to draw on the Irish penitential tradition, specifically on the seventh-century penitential of Cumméne.Footnote 46

Other examples of changes include the substitution of one word for another. Some words can be trivial – like shilling for shekel – but the swapping of other words could have had serious, even theological, implications.Footnote 47 A case in point is clause §3 of the biblical introduction, which names Christ rather than God as the creator in the fourth commandment (Exodus xx.21). Further in the biblical text, the compiler of the Domboc was clearly puzzled by the occurrence of the plural form ‘Gods’ in Exodus xxi.6 (§11), xxii.9 (§28) and xxii.28 (§37). In one place he changed ‘Gods’ to ‘the Lord’ (Dryhten), and on the remaining two occasions he omitted the mention of the divinity altogether.

Other omissions include all the verses that are concerned with sacrifices, although it may perhaps have been more controversial to retain them. Another omission is of the entire second commandment, which forbids the making of images. Instead of the second commandment the biblical introduction adds at the end of the Decalogue a verse found later in Exodus (xx.23), which forbids the making of metal gods, likely a reference to idols of various kinds. Some omissions have been explained as the possible result of influence from the Insular penitential tradition – for example, innocens is omitted from Exodus xxi.19 in both the biblical introduction and the Penitential of Cumméne – but when the same omissions occur also in certain versions of the Vetus Latina (as is the case with the omission of innocens) then what appears to be a deliberate adaptation of the Bible may in fact be a quotation from a different Bible-text or from an intermediary source that itself drew upon a different Bible-text.Footnote 48

The Domboc and the Hibernensis do indeed quote from both the Vulgate and the Vetus Latina. This ostensible inconsistency may be explained by a debt to intermediary sources, some of which drew on the Vulgate and others on the Vetus Latina. But drawing on different Bible-texts may also be a matter of choice, as it was for Pope Gregory the Great, an author cherished by both Alfred and the compilers of the Hibernensis. Footnote 49 In the preface to his Moralia in Iob Gregory describes alternating between the two Bible-texts: ‘Novam vero translationem dissero, sed cum probationis causa me exigit, nunc novam nunc veteram per testimonia adsumo, ut, quia sedes apostolica cui Deo auctore praesideo utraque utitur, mei quoque labor studii ex utraque fulciatur’ (‘Now it is the new translation that I comment on; but when a case to be proved requires it, I take now the new and now the old for testimony, that as the Apostolic See, over which I preside by ordinance of God, uses both, the labours of my understanding may have the support of both’).Footnote 50

To say that the Bible is the main source for biblical quotations in the Domboc and the Hibernensis may seem like stating the obvious, but in light of the presence of adapted biblical verses this proposition is not self-evident. The sources of the Hibernensis have, for the most part, been charted.Footnote 51 The identification of sources in the Hibernensis is facilitated by attributions found throughout the text (although not all are correct). Verbatim quotations can be easily traced also with the help of modern editions and electronic databases. In regard specifically to doubtful material which may be parabiblical, adapted or spurious, we can sometimes say with confidence when it was not of the compilers’ own making: sometimes the compilers themselves tell us that they were quoting, and sometimes they name the non-biblical source. Examples will help to clarify these points. Below are a couple of texts that the Hibernensis attributes to the Bible but which do not actually form part of the Latin biblical canon. In the first, the source can be identified. In the second example we see how contemporary readers themselves were uncertain about its origin. In each example the first sentence comprises a rule and the subsequent sentence is a testimonium in support of the rule.

Example 1

Hibernensis H39.17 V38.18 De eo quod debet princeps facere heredem in uita sua… Originis in annalibus: Noe diuissit orbem terrae filiis suis antequam moreretur. ‘That a princeps ought to appoint an heir in his lifetime … Origen in the annals: Noah divided the world between his sons before he died.’

This text, attributed to a biblical episode purportedly told by the Church Father Origen (but likely an Irish sage who assumed a patristic name), is actually drawn from the Book of Jubilees.Footnote 52 Originally written in Hebrew, today the text survives in complete form only in Ge’ez. A fifth-century Latin translation of a part of this text has been argued to have been known in Ireland.Footnote 53 The Hibernensis quotes it to make a statement about the right to succeed to the office of princeps (Old Irish airchinnech), who was the head of an ecclesiastical institution in Ireland.

Example 2

Hibernensis 26.13 (H29.17 V28.17) De uindictis tardis in peccatores… Lamech parricida parricidae post multum tempus consummitur. ‘Concerning delayed punishments for sinners … Lamech, the kin-slayer of a kin-slayer, is exterminated after a long time.’

Here the biblical story from Genesis iv.19–24 was augmented with additional detail asserting that Lamech did not merely kill a man, but a kinsman, who was himself a kinslayer. The kinslayer was his extraordinarily long-lived ancestor Cain. This very same story is attested also in the biblical commentaries of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury and Abbot Hadrian.Footnote 54

Theodore and Hadrian attributed this tradition to the Book of Jubilees (which they knew as Leptigeneseos), but as Michael Lapidge rightly notes, this story does not actually occur in the Book of Jubilees.Footnote 55 Other witnesses to the tradition regarding Lamech’s slaying of Cain are John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Jerome, who attributes the story to ‘a certain Hebrew book’.Footnote 56 The story occurs also in the early medieval Jewish text Midrash Tanhuma Yelammedenu, which – like Jerome – is itself likely to have drawn on an earlier Hebrew source.Footnote 57 The origin for the story remains unknown.

Unlike the Hibernensis, which names many of its sources, the Domboc is not forthcoming either about its direct sources or about its sources of inspiration. The exceptions are the Bible itself and the laws of previous kings, but influences by texts from Ireland and Carolingian Europe have also been detected. However, as we will soon see, instead of reaching Wessex directly from Ireland, the Irish influences might have arrived by an indirect route.

Evidence of Irish learning in Wessex

Alfred does not seem to have intentionally sought to benefit from Irish learning. Of all the foreign scholars who are known to have been summoned to Alfred’s court, none was Irish. An exception is the serendipitous incident told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (891) about the three Irishmen who reached Britain in a boat with no oars and were warmly received at the king’s court. Another, less legendary route by which Irish learning could have been transitted into Wessex was the thriving cult of St Patrick at Glastonbury. Patrick was believed to have been abbot of Glastonbury and to have died there in 472. According to the late tenth-century Life of St Dunstan, Irish pilgrims flocked to Glastonbury, some bearing books.Footnote 58 Another Irish saint venerated at Glastonbury was Indract, perhaps a ninth-century abbot of Iona, who is said to have been martyred with his companions near the monastery en route to Rome in 854.Footnote 59 Commenting on Indract’s cult, Lesley Abrams suggested that the abbey may ‘have acted as a stopping-off point for Irish ecclesiastics’ travelling to and from the Continent.Footnote 60

What Irish books might pilgrims or others have carried into Wessex? Pádraig Ó Néill has suggested that an Irish work of biblical exegesis, the so-called Reference Bible, influenced the liberal translation of the first fifty Psalms, which is attributed to Alfred along with a commentary on them.Footnote 61 The work need not have arrived directly from Ireland: the well-attested Continental transmission of the Reference Bible would make it just as likely that it reached Wessex from the Continent. Such an indirect route might have obscured its Irish origin. Another work of biblical exegesis (printed in the Patrologia Latina as In Psalmorum Librum Exegesis),Footnote 62 which incorporates Irish material, was argued to have influenced the commentary attributed to Alfred. This is a recension of Julian of Æclanum’s epitome of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Commentary on the Psalms, which might have been copied by an Irish scribe in Bobbio.Footnote 63

Another Irish text has been argued to have circulated among the intellectual circle surrounding Alfred, and to have influenced the Domboc’s biblical introduction. This is the so-called Liber ex lege Moysi, and the case for its influence is persuasive.Footnote 64 The Liber is a collection of 291 verses from Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, as well as six verses from Numbers.Footnote 65 Some verses are quoted in full but others are omitted, quoted out of context, truncated or adapted. The Bible-text of the Liber follows the Vulgate for the most part but it occasionally draws on Old Latin versions. It survives in four manuscripts, all of which contain also the Hibernensis. Both the Hibernensis and Alfred’s biblical introduction can be shown to have readings in common with the Liber ex lege Moysi, including adapted verses. Some of the adaptations may be explained by a wish to bring the text up to date with contemporary circumstances: ‘Both the Liber and the Domboc present a version of the laws of Exodus meant to have some bearing on the legislation of their own day, and we may assume that doing so in both cases involved a certain amount of corrective emendation.’Footnote 66

There appears to be a general agreement that the Liber was a source for the biblical introduction.Footnote 67 What has been questioned is whether the Liber was the only source from which the biblical introduction drew its verses. A recent sceptic, Anya Adair, argues that if the Liber was indeed used, then it could not have been used on its own but must have been used alongside other Bible texts. This view is shared by Jurasinski, who believes that the introduction reflects multiple influences, among which are different Bible-texts.Footnote 68

Carella, who argued forcefully for the influence of the Liber on the biblical introduction, argued also for the influence of the Hibernensis on that introduction.Footnote 69 Carella contends that both the Hibernensis and the biblical introduction take an interest in similar legal questions and display a similar attitude towards certain legal authorities. This is an attractive proposition, but it is ultimately based on inconclusive anecdotal evidence. Nevertheless, it is possible to argue for influence – or at least indirect dependence – on more objective grounds, by identifying close parallels in wording. A parallel of this kind is found in the unusual way in which both texts render Exodus xxi.29–30:

[29] ‘Si bos cornupeta, uirum aut foeminam occiderit et mortuus fuerit, bos lapidibus obruetur et non comedetur, et dominus bouis innocens erit. Si bos cornupeta fuerit ab heri et nudius tertius, nec recluserit eum dominus occideritque hominem, bos lapidibus obruetur, et dominum eius occident, [30] siue dabit pretium pro anima sua, quantum iudices iudicauerint’: Hibernensis 52.3

[29] ‘Gif se oxa hnitol wære twam dagum ær oððe ðrim, 7 se hlaford hit wisse 7 hine inne betynan nolde, 7 he ðonne wer oððe wíf ofsloge, sie he mid stanum ofworpod, [30] 7 sie se hlaford ófslegen oððe forgolden, swa ðæt witan to ryhte finden’: Alfred, Biblical Introduction c. 21

[29] ‘If the ox was given to pushing with its horns two or three days before, and the lord knew of it and did not wish to enclose him, and it then killed a man or woman, let it be slain by stoning, and let the lord be slain…’

[30] ‘…unless he shall give for his life whatsoever judges (iudices) have adjudged’: [Hibernensis].

[30] ‘…or paid for, as the witan may deem right’ [Alfred, Biblical introduction].Footnote 70

Both texts, the Hibernensis and the Domboc, render Exodus xxi.29 in a manner that is almost entirely faithful to the Vulgate. But the following verse, Exodus xxi.30, was modified in both. The modification consists of the introduction of a judicial authority. This authority – designated iudices in the Hibernensis and witan in the biblical introduction – is to determine the value of compensation in cases in which capital punishment was commuted to compensation in kind.Footnote 71 No judicial authority is mentioned in the original verse, which reads: ‘Quod si pretium fuerit ei impositum, dabit pro anima sua quidquid fuerit postulatus.’ The addition is unlikely to be a coincidence.

The Domboc could have changed the wording of the verse after encountering the adapted verse in the Hibernensis, but it is equally possible that both the Hibernensis and the Domboc were drawing on a common source which has yet to be identified. There are four additional cases in which both the Hibernensis and the Domboc share non-Vulgate readings, but two of these have parallels in Vetus Latina texts.Footnote 72 A debt to a common source rather than direct influence can therefore not be ruled out for the remaining two cases.

Evidence of Carolingian learning in Wessex

Connections between Alfred and Carolingian intellectuals are better attested. They go back to Hincmar, the leading figure in the scholarly circle at Reims, and to Alfred’s father, Æthelwulf. In 856 Hincmar presided over the wedding between Æthelwulf and his child bride Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, at Verberie. Alfred, himself a child at the time, attended the wedding.Footnote 73

Charles, like his grandfather Charlemagne, publicly cast himself in the image of the biblical king Josiah, initiator of the so-called Deuteronomic reform (Charlemagne compared his own reform initiatives with Josiah’s in the introduction to the Admonitio generalis).Footnote 74 A visual testament to Charles the Bald’s adoration of Josiah is the frontpiece from the so-called Psalter of Charles the Bald, now Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, ms lat. 1152, which likens him to the biblical king.

Alfred also identified with a biblical king, but unlike his step-grandfather, he chose Solomon, who is remembered not for his legal reforms but for his wisdom and charisma as judge.Footnote 75 Janet Nelson highlighted the way in which the first English royal Ordo, which informed notions of kingship in Wessex, invoked Solomon. Alfred himself is explicitly equated by his biographer, Asser, with Solomon.Footnote 76

Of crucial importance to Reims’s intellectual influence on Wessex is Grimbald, the renowned scholar who arrived in Wessex from Reims on Alfred’s invitation. Praised in the preface to the Alfredian translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care – alongside Archbishop Plegmund, Asser,and John the mass-priest – Grimbald is generally assumed to have brought with him books to aid in Alfred’s educational reform programme.Footnote 77 One of these books has been speculated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge to have been the ninth-century (perhaps) Breton manuscript now Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Hatton 42.Footnote 78 Hatton 42 contains an assortment of normative texts that circulated on the Continent. Among them are Irish, Anglo-Saxon and Continental penitentials, excerpts from Roman law, excerpts from the first book of the capitulary collection by Ansegis, a copy of the influential Carolingian canonical collection known as the Dionysio-Hadriana, the aforementioned Admonitio generalis, and, most important for present purposes: a complete copy of the Hibernensis in its longest recension.Footnote 79 This very copy of the Hibernensis in Hatton 42 would later find its way to Worcester, where it would be used by Wulfstan (d. 1023), while he was bishop there, for compiling his own canonical collection.Footnote 80 Serendipity of this kind may account also for the way in which texts came to the attention of Alfred and the scholarly circle around him.

Grimbald might also have been a conduit for texts written by Hincmar, a scholar whose conception of law has been argued to have exerted an influence on Alfred. For Patrick Wormald, Alfred’s understanding of law was no less than the embodiment of Hincmar’s ideas about law. In Wormald’s words ‘the Domboc could almost be seen as a primer of Hincmarian principles’.Footnote 81 Wormald noted five such principles, which can be laid out in a causal sequence: (i) mankind’s inability to live by God’s laws led to (ii) the need for human affairs to be managed by secular legislation, which was then made (iii) public and (iv) committed to writing, with the consequence that (v) written royal legislation would be expected to draw on the laws of previous kings. In a similar vein, Michael Treschow noted that both Hincmar and Alfred said that church councils have succeeded the Old and New Testaments as sources for legislation.Footnote 82

And there is further evidence for Hincmarian influence on Alfred’s biblical introduction. It resides in the very tendency of the biblical introduction to adapt biblical verses. Jean Devisse found that Hincmar adapted nearly a third of the verses that he quoted from the Bible in his De praedestinatione Dei et libero arbitrio, De una et non trina Deitate, De divortio Lotharii regis et Tetbergae reginae, the Opusculum LV capitulorum and his letter to Louis the German.Footnote 83 Devisse provides examples ranging across many books of both the Old and New Testaments: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Job, Psalms, Isaiah, Wisdom, Daniel, Matthew, Luke, John, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, Hebrews and 1 Peter.Footnote 84 But unlike the changes that appear in the biblical introduction of the Domboc, Hincmar’s changes were usually subtle: swapping singulars and plurals or altering tenses and cases.

Alfred and Hincmar can sometimes be seen to disagree about the literal interpretation of certain legal verses. But there was at least one legal text of the Old Testament that both Alfred and Hincmar accepted literally, give or take a few adjustments. Like Alfred, who opened the Domboc with the Decalogue, Hincmar himself accepted the validity of the Decalogue as being eternal and undiminished by the New Testament. Unlike other Old Testament laws – which Christians were asked to interpret allegorically as shadows of things to come – Hincmar believed that the Ten Commandments (which he said were written by the very finger of GodFootnote 85) were to be understood only in their literal sense.Footnote 86

That the Ten Commandments adorned Carolingian legal texts is well known. Alcuin, who is generally accepted to have authored the Admonitio generalis on Charlemagne’s behalf, included in the Admonitio a revised version of the Decalogue.Footnote 87 The reason that Alcuin revised the Decalogue in the Admonitio in the first place was to make it relevant for his own day. And it can be argued that he wished to portray some verses from the Old Testament as being on a par with the New. Gerda Heydemann draws attention to the manner in which Alcuin paired Old Testament verses with equivalents from the New Testament.Footnote 88 But there are other choices that Alcuin made in the Admonitio which may imply a certain anxiety about admitting Old Testament law in an unqualified manner. One such choice was to quote the first commandment indirectly via its iteration in the Gospel of Mark. This may be interpreted as a wish to give priority to the New Testament.

Reims was also a centre in which Jewish rabbinical literature was known. There are a number of texts and manuscripts that attest to this, of which the work of Remigius (d. c. 908) of Auxerre is the best example. From the 880s or 890s Remigius started teaching at the Cathedral School at Reims by invitation of Hincmar’s successor, Archbishop Fulk, eventually serving as the head of that school.Footnote 89 Remigius prepared a commentary on Genesis, described by Michael Gorman as ‘perhaps the most original of all Carolingian commentaries on Genesis’.Footnote 90 It is certainly among the richest in terms of sources.Footnote 91 Where the author quotes texts which he attributes ‘dicunt Hebraei’, the source can be traced to Pseudo-Philo’s aforementioend Liber antiquitatum biblicarum, a Rewritten Bible containing the biblical narrative from Creation to the death of Saul. Remigius’ commentary has also been shown by Burton van Name Edwards and Johannes Heil to transmit traditions from the sixth-century Midrash Raba and from the seventh-century targum by Pseudo-Jonathan.Footnote 92

The question of Remigius’ authorship of a popular gloss commentary on Boethius’ Consolation of philosophy has been debated for a long time.Footnote 93 And there is also a debate on whether or not it inspired Alfred in initiating an independent interpretative translation of the Consolations.Footnote 94 A detailed critique by Rosalind Love of the question of whether the Old English Boethius drew on the tradition of glossing of the Consolation, and in particular on the commentary attributed to Remigius, finds that this is entirely plausible, although no verbatim borrowings can be found.Footnote 95 What can be observed are certain common ideas, as noted by Pratt and others, for example ideas on the three orders of society (which may have originated with the School of Auxerre).Footnote 96 The Reims connection, therefore, presents itself as a potential source for a variety of influences on the thought world of Alfred and his court scholars.

Neither the Hibernensis nor the Domboc’s biblical introduction draw on the Old Testament in an uncomplicated manner: by omitting certain verses, especially on sacrifices, the biblical introduction acknowledges the difficulties in following the Old Testament in the Christian era. Responding to similar challenges regarding the status of the Old Testament and in particular its rules on sacrifices and ritual purity, the Hibernensis enlists exegesis by Eucherius and Jerome to reinforce the doctrine – originally expressed in Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians – that the Old Testament is merely a shadow of things to come and must be tapped with caution, preferably by appealing to allegory.Footnote 97 Exegesis thus allows the compilers to reclaim the Old Testament as a source for Christian jurisprudence.

One may interpret the use of parabiblical material as another way of adapting Old Testament law to a Christian audience. Such a functional interpretation on our part would frame the Rewritten Bible primarily as a genre whose main attribute – as some saw it – is to make the Old Testament ‘more relevant or acceptable to a later generation of readers’.Footnote 98 This, however, cannot be the only explanation for the Hibernensis’s and the Domboc’s choice to use parabiblical verses because parabiblical material is sometimes quoted alongside genuine Old Testament verses. It would appear, therefore, that the parabiblical verses were supplementary to the biblical verses and neither type seems to have been given primacy over the other. Furthermore, we lack an example in which the absence of a genuine biblical verse in support of a particular rule compelled the authors of our legal texts to quote parabiblical material instead.

It is reasonable to assume that the authors and compilers reviewed here were able to tell the difference between a genuine biblical text and an adapted biblical text (although we may allow for ambiguous borderline cases). Their habit of incorporating parabiblical material must therefore be regarded as a conscious choice, just as Pope Gregory exercised choice when he alternated between Bible-texts. Alcuin, Hincmar, Remigius, the compilers of the Hibernensis and the scholars at the royal court in Wessex were all familiar with Rewritten Bibles. These came in different forms: there were retellings of entire biblical books (for example, Pseudo Philo), there were midrashim, targumim, biblical tales told as heroic epics, florilegia containing modified biblical legal precepts, and so on. Some authors – from Gildas to the compilers of the Domboc’s biblical introduction – made adaptations of their own. All this invites us to contemplate the extent to which quoting parabiblical texts might have been a literary convention cherished within certain scholarly discourses.

Parabiblical traditions seem not to have been rejected or condemned in the same way that apocryphal books were.Footnote 99 No Carolingian initiative for standardising the Bible seems to have taken aim at parabiblical texts let alone to have been conceived as a corrective reaction to such texts.Footnote 100 (If there had been unsuccessful initiatives to suppress the dissemination of Rewritten Bibles then these can be equated with the failed campaigns to eradicate canonical collections which did not conform to Carolingian standards.Footnote 101) The international network of scholars who were partial to parabiblical texts spanned Ireland, Wessex and Reims. This reception puts paid to any preconception that the Bible and the various traditions of Rewritten Bibles were regarded as antithetical. Rather, the juxtaposition of the biblical and parabiblical suggests that the two were deployed by some as alternatives.

Despite the higher degree of sophistication with which the Hibernensis accommodates Old Testament verses, its use of the Bible bears comparison with the Domboc in a number of important ways: both works draw on the legal portions of the Old Testament, both works testify to vernacular traditions of interpretation, both works appear to draw also on biblical florilegia, both works contain adapted quotations from the Bible, both works make use of non-standard texts of the Bible, and both quote Bible-texts that share certain idiosyncrasies. The main difference between the Domboc and the Hibernensis remains the source of enactment: the Domboc is a royal text while the Hibernensis is best classified as ecclesiastical. And while the main body of the laws in the Domboc is structurally independent of the biblical introduction, the laws of the Hibernensis are inseparable from the biblical quotations, parabiblical quotations and biblical exegesis with which they are combined.

Footnotes

Research for this article was made possible thanks to a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, during Michaelmas term 2021. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to sound some of the ideas aired here at the Oxford Medieval History Research Seminar (11 October 2021) and at the Graduate Seminar of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge (8 November 2021). I am grateful to Gerda Heydemann, Stefan Jurasinski, Tom Lambert nd David Pratt for making time during Covid lockdowns for long zoom conversations and, more recently, for commenting on drafts. My thanks also for helpful suggestions received from an anonymous reader for this Journal.

References

1 The edition and translation of the Hibernensis used here is by Flechner, Roy: The Hibernensis, Washington, DC 2019 Google Scholar. The edition and translation of the laws of Alfred and of Ine is by Jurasinski, Stefan and Oliver, Lisi: The laws of Alfred: the Domboc and the making of Anglo-Saxon law, Cambridge 2021, 220–437 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Note that the coordinates that Jurasinski and Oliver use in their division of Alfred’s and Ine’s laws differ from those in Felix Liebermann’s standard edition, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, Halle 1903–16.

2 Flechner, Roy, Making laws for a Christian society: the Hibernensis and the beginnings of church law in Ireland and Britain, London 2021, 113 10.4324/9781351267243CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It has long been recognised that this dependence on the Bible was unprecedented among legal texts. See Fournier, Paul, ‘De l’Influence de la collection irlandaise sur la formation des collections canoniques’, Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et étranger xxiii (1899), 27–78 Google Scholar at p. 73, and ‘Le Liber ex lege Moysi et les tendances bibliques du droit canonique irlandais’, Revue celtique xxx (1909), 221–34 at p. 228; A. M. Stickler, Historia iuris canonici latini: historia fontium, Turin 1950, 93; and C. Munier, Les Sources patristiques du droit de l’Église du VIIIe au XIIIe siècle, Strasbourg 1957, 31.

3 Heydemann, Gerda, ‘The people of God and the law: biblical models in Carolingian legislation’, Speculum xcv (2020), 89–131 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The historiography on the influence of the Old Testament on early medieval European law has tended to concentrate on three areas in particular: the observance of the Sabbath, the payment of tithes and rules of ritual purity. The standard work remains Raymund Kottje, Studien zum Einfluss des Alten Testamentes auf Recht und Liturgie des frühen Mittelalters (6.–8. Jahrhundert), Bonn 1964.

5 The laws of Alfred (Jurasinski and Oliver edn), 66.

6 Debts to common sources were asserted by Fournier, ‘Le Liber ex lege Moysi et les tendances bibliques du droit canonique irlandais’, Revue celtique xxx (1909), 230–1; Patrick Wormald, The making of English law: King Alfred to the twelfth century, I: Legislation and its limits, Malden, Ma 1999, 418–19; and Carella, B., ‘The source of the prologue to the laws of Alfred’, Peritia xix (2005), 91–118 10.1484/J.Peri.3.571CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An argument for direct dependence was made by Carella, B., ‘Evidence for Hiberno-Latin thought in the prologue to the laws of Alfred’, Studies in Philology cviii (2011), 1–26 10.1353/sip.2011.0002CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 25–7.

7 Ivarsen, Ingrid, ‘A vernacular genre? Latin and the early English laws’, Journal of Medieval History xlvii (2021), 497–508 10.1080/03044181.2021.1986661CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 500.

8 There is an extensive body of literature concerned with the Old Testament in early medieval Ireland. Among the earliest and most influential are , Fournier, ‘Le Liber ex lege Moysi’, 221–34, and Kottje, Studien zum Einfluss des Alten Testamentes. More recent, and summing up a lifetime’s work, is Martin McNamara, The Bible in the early Irish Church, Leiden 2022Google Scholar.

9 Géza Vermes, Scripture and tradition in Judaism: Haggadic studies (1961), 2nd edn, Leiden 1973, 62–126.

10 W. R. F. Browning, A dictionary of the Bible, 2nd edn, Oxford 2009, 54.

11 On knowledge of Pseudo-Philo in the early medieval Latin West see Burton van Name Edwards (ed.), Remigius of Auxerre: expositio super Genesim, CCCM cxxxvi, Turnhout 1999, pp. xlix–xl; Guido Kisch, Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum biblicarum, Notre Dame, In 1949; Schaller, Berndt, ‘Zur Überlieferungsgeschichte des ps.-philonischen Liber antiquitatem biblicarum im Mittelalter’, Journal for the Study of Judaism x (1979), 64–73 10.1163/157006379X00237CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frederick James Murphy, Pseudo-Philo: rewriting the Bible, Oxford 1993; and Heil, Johannes, ‘Die Konstruktion der hispanisch-jüdischen Geschichte der ersten Jahrhunderte – ein Versuch (mit span u. engl. Zusammenfassung)’, Temas Medievales xxv (2017), 39–61 Google Scholar.

12 David Levenson and Thomas Martin, ‘The ancient Latin translations of Josephus’, in Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers (eds), A companion to Josephus, London 2015, 322–44; Pollard, Richard, ‘Reading Josephus at Vivarium? Annotations and exegesis in early copies of the Antiquities’, Florilegium xxx (2013), 103–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘The De excidio of “Hegesippus” and the reception of Josephus in the early Middle Ages’, Viator xlvi (2015), 65–100.

13 On knowledge of Targumim among Christian scholars see Edwards, Remigius, pp. xlix–l.

14 On some possible influences of midrashim in Christian learning of the early medieval Latin West see Johannes Heil, ‘Theodulf, Haimo, and Jewish traditions of biblical learning: exploring Carolingian culture’s lost Spanish heritage’, in Cullen J. Chandler and Steven Stofferahn (eds), Discovery and distinction in the early Middle Ages: studies in honour of John J. Contreni, Kalamazoo, Mi 2013, 88–115, and ‘“Latin Midrashim”, or: how to treat historically-contradictory evidence’, in Johannes Heil and Sumi Shimahara (eds), From Theodulf to Rashi and beyond: texts, techniques, and transfer in western European exegesis (800–1100), Leiden 2022, 183–213.

15 Heil and Shimahara, From Theodulf to Rashi, 1–20 at p. 9.

16 Peter J. Lucas (ed.), Exodus, London 1977; ‘Exodus (lines 1–275)’, trans. S. B. Greenfield, Old English Newsletter xxi (1987), 15–20 [verse trans.]; trans. by S. A. J. Bradley, in Anglo-Saxon poetry, London 1982, 49–65 [prose trans.]; Judith, ed. Mark Griffith, Exeter 1997; trans. by S. A. J. Bradley, in Anglo-Saxon poetry, 495–504.

17 The Junius manuscript, ed. G. Krapp, New York 1931, 111–32; trans. by S. A. Ju. Bradley, in Anglo-Saxon poetry, London 1995, 66–86.

18 There is no published edition of the entire text. For partial editions and translations see Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Clavis litterarum Hibernensium: medieval Irish books and texts (c. 400–c. 1600), Turnhout 2017, i. 137–8, no. 103.

19 John Carey, The ever-new tongue – In Tenga Bithnúa: the text in the book of Lismore, Turnhout 2018.

20 There are around sixty-five Irish apocryphal texts, only five of which date before the ninth century. Of these five, only a fragment from the Book of Jubilees has an Old Testament focus. The Irish apocryphal corpus is Ó Corráin, Clavis, i. 137–95, nos 103–68. Further on the apocrypha in early Ireland see M. McNamara, The Bible and the Apocrypha in the early Irish Church (A.D. 600–1200): collected essays, Turnhout 2015.

21 Gildas, De excidio Britanniae, ed. Theodor Mommsen, MGH, AA xiii, Berlin 1898, 25–85. Michael Winterbottom reprints Mommsen’s edition with some revisions and supplies a translation: Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and other documents, London 1978, 87–142 [text], 213–79 [trans].

22 Winterbottom, Gildas, 156–9.

23 Thomas O’Loughlin, Gildas and the Scriptures: observing the world through a biblical lens, Turnhout 2012, 134, 138, 144, 145, 148, 156, 158, 159, 160–3, 167, 170–1, 175, 181, 189, 224, 225, 249, 264, 266, 274, 280, 294, 299.

24 Stephen J. Joyce conducts a thorough review of the evidence, but in the absence of any verbatim quotation there is no definitive proof: The legacy of Gildas: constructions of authority in the early medieval West, Woodbridge 2022, 107–30.

25 Roy Flechner, ‘The problem of originality in early medieval canon law: legislating by means of contradictions in the Collectio Hibernensis’, Viator xliii (2012), 29–47.

26 Idem, Making laws, 10–23.

27 Ibid. 1, 31, 39, 42, 44, 52, 53, 152,155.

28 The two are not mutually exclusive. See, respectively, T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Early Irish law’, in Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (ed.), A New history of Ireland I, Oxford 2005, 331–370 at p. 353, and Flechner, ‘The problem of originality’, 43.

29 What follows is based on Flechner, Making laws, 89–110. For an index of sources see Flechner, Hibernensis, 982–1000.

30 For a comprehensive (but not exhaustive) list of examples of ‘inventive exegesis’ in the Hibernensis see Flechner, Making laws, 124–7.

31 On exempla and testimonia see T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The construction of the Hibernensis’, Peritia xii (1998), 209–37 at p. 210, and Flechner, Making laws, 116.

32 Hibernensis 25.1–2 (Flechner edn), 159–60; Flechner, Making laws, 35–6.

33 Patrick Wormald, ‘Alfred [Ælfred]’, ODNB i. 718–23; Malcolm Godden, ‘Did King Alfred write anything?’, Medium Ævum lxxvi (2007), 1–23 at p. 18.

34 The laws of Alfred (Jurasinksi and Oliver edn), 32.

35 But allusions to the Old Testament in the Domboc (including the laws of Ine therein) have occasionally been inferred. See, for example, Ryan Lavelle, ‘Ine 70.1 and royal provision in Anglo-Saxon Wessex’, in Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider (eds), Kingship, legislation and power in Anglo-Saxon England, Woodbridge 2013, 259–74 at pp. 263–6: a parallel with King Solomon’s food supplies from his people. Arguably, Domboc §28, on a beast wounding and its owner settling with the injured, may be a distant echo to Exodus xxi.29–30, quoted in clause 21 of the biblical introduction.

36 Liebermann, Felix, ‘King Alfred and the Mosaic law’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society vi (1908–10), 21–31 Google Scholar at p. 31.

37 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship in England and on the Continent, Oxford 1971, 145.

38 Richard Dammery, ‘The law-code of King Alfred the Great’, unpubl. PhD diss. Cambridge 1990, i. 232.

39 Treschow, Michael, ‘The prologue to Alfred’s Law Code: instruction in the spirit of mercy’, Florilegium xiii (1994), 79–110 10.3138/flor.13.006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Tom Lambert, Law and order in Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford 2017, 73.

41 David Pratt, The political thought of King Alfred, Cambridge 2010, 222; Stefan Jurainski, ‘Alfred, the Bible and the authority of written law: reassessing the Carolingian inheritance’, in Gerda Heydemann and Rosamond McKitterick (eds), The politics of interpretation: the Bible and the formation of legal authority in the early Middle Ages, Ostfildern 2025, 183–200.

42 Dammery, The law-code of King Alfred, i. 222–32

43 Heydemann, ‘The people of God’, 116–17.

44 Pelteret, Slavery in early medieval England, 83.

45 Penitential of Cumméne §§9–11, ed. and trans. Ludwig Bieler, in The Irish penitentials, Dublin 1963, 108–34 at pp. 120–1. An Old-Irish law tract requires a replacement worker to be provided: Bretha Crólige §60, ed. Daniel A. Binchy, Ériu, xii (1938), 1–77 at pp. 47–9. Sick maintenance in Irish law is discussed by Fergus Kelly in A guide to early Irish law, Dublin 1988, 130–1. For Anglo-Saxon, Frankish and Lombard parallels see Oliver, Lisi, ‘Sick-maintenance in Anglo-Saxon law’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology cvii (2008), 303–2610.2307/20722636CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Stefan Jurasinski, ‘“Sick-maintenance” and earlier English law’, in Jay Paul Gates and Nicole Marafioti (eds), Capital and corporal punishment in Anglo-Saxon England, Rochester, NY 2014, 74–91 at p. 79.

47 For a complete list and discussion see Dammery, The law-code of King Alfred, i. 222–32.

48 Jurasinski, Stefan, ‘Violence, penance and secular law in Alfred’s Mosaic prologue’, Haskins Society Journal xxii (2010), 25–42 Google Scholar, and ‘“Sick-maintenance” and earlier English law’, 87. The omission of innocens occurs also in the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum, 2.1.1, ed. and trans. Robert M. Frakes, in Compiling the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum in late antiquity, Oxford 2012, 161. Frakes’s comparison (pp. 93–4) shows that the omission of innocens does not occur in the seventh-century Lyon codex of the Itala (Cathedral Archive, Lyon, 67), which is otherwise in close correspondence with the Collatio.

49 Central to the reception of Gregory at the court in Wessex is the Hierdeboc, the translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis attributed to King Alfred. See especially Pratt, The political thought of King Alfred, 193–213. On Gregory and the Hibernensis see Luned Davies, ‘The “mouth of gold”: Gregorian texts in the Collectio canonum Hibernensis’, in P. Ní Chatháin and M. Richter (eds), Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: texts and transmission, Dublin 2002, 249–68.

50 Moralia in Iob, Epist. ad Leandrum, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL cxliii, Turnhout 1979, line 225; Morals on the book of Job, trans. James Bliss, Oxford 1844–50, i. 11.

51 F. W. H. Wasserschleben, Die irische Kanonensammlung (Giessen 1874), 2nd edn, Leipzig 1885; M. P. Sheehy, ‘Influences of ancient Irish law on the Collectio canonum Hibernensis’, in S. Kuttner (ed.), Proceedings of the third international congress of medieval canon law, Vatican City 1971, 31–41; R. Sharpe, ‘Gildas as a father of the Church’, in M. Lapidge and D. N. Dumville (eds), Gildas: new approaches, Woodbridge 1984, 191–206; Luned M. Davies, ‘The biblical text of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis’, in P. Ní Chatháin and M. Richter (eds), Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Aes: learning and literature, Stuttgart 1996, 17–41; ‘Isidorian texts and the Hibernensis’, Peritia xi (1997), 207–49; ‘Statuta ecclesiae antiqua and the Gallic councils in the Hibernensis’, Peritia xiv (2000), 85–100; and ‘The “mouth of gold”’, 249–68; Meens, Rob, ‘The oldest manuscript witness of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis ’, Peritia xiv (2000), 1–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gorman, Michael, ‘Patristic and pseudo-patristic citations in the Collectio Hibernensis ’, Revue bénédictine cxx (2011), 18–93 10.1484/J.RB.5.100465CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flechner, Hibernensis, ii. 982–1000, and Making laws, 89–110.

52 Jubilees A.M. 1569, trans. from Ge’ez by R. H. Charles in The book of Jubilees or the little Genesis, Oxford 1902, 68–9. On the Irish Origen see Flechner, Roy, ‘The chronicle of Pseudo-Origen: simulating a world chronicle in seventh-century Ireland’, Peritia xxxi (2020), 89–106 10.1484/J.PERIT.5.124470CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Ó Corráin, Clavis, i. 142 (§105).

54 Bernhard Bischoff and Michael Lapidge, Biblical commentaries from the Canterbury school of Theodore and Hadrian, Cambridge 1994, 314, 15: first commentary on the Pentateuch §54.

55 Ibid. 446.

56 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis §22.2, printed as Sermo admonitorius sub initium sanctae quadragesimae, PG liii. 168–9; Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Quaestiones in Genesim §44, in Natalio Fernandez Marcos and Angel Saenz-Badillos (eds), Theodoreti Cyrensis quaestiones in Octateuchum, Madrid 1979, 43; Jerome, Letter 36.4, ed. I. Hilberg, CCSL liv (1910), 272. All sources were identified by Bischoff and Lapidge, Biblical commentaries, 446.

57 Midrash Tanhuma §11, trans. S. A. Berman in Midrash Tanhuma-Yelammedenu, Hoboken, NJ 1996, 32.

58 The association of Patrick with Glastonbury is investigated by Lesley Abrams, ‘St Patrick and Glastonbury Abbey: nihil ex nihil fit’, in David N. Dumville and others, Saint Patrick: A.D. 493–1993, Woodbridge 1993, 233–44.

59 Michael Lapidge, ‘The cult of St Indract at Glastonbury’, in D. Whitelock, R. McKitterick and D. N. Dumville (eds), Ireland in early medieval Europe, Cambridge 1982, 179–212.

60 Abrams, ‘St Patrick and Glastonbury Abbey’, 236.

61 King Alfred’s Old English prose translation of the first fifty Psalms, trans. Pádraig Ó Néill, Cambridge, Ma 2001, 43; Of the Reference Bible (Das Bibelwerk) only the Pentateuch has been edited. See The reference Bible:das Biblework. Inter pauca problesmata de enigmatibus ex tomis canonicis nunc prompta sunt praefatio et libri de Pentateucho Moysi, ed. G. MacGinty, CCCM clxxiii (2000).

62 PL xciii. 477–1098.

63 For manuscript, edition and descriptive literature see Ó Corráin, Clavis, 474–5 (§369). For discussion see Bonifatius Fischer, ‘Bedae de titulis psalmorum liber’, in J. Autenrieth and F. Brünholzl (eds), Festschrift Bernhard Bischoff zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, Stuttgart 1971, 90–110 at pp. 93–100; Ó Néill, King Alfred’s Old English prose translation, 30–44; Pratt, The political thought of King Alfred, 248–50.

64 But I am unconvinced by Patrick Wormald’s suggestion (which he stated with caution) that the Domboc might have been influenced also by another compendium of biblical quotations, the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum: Making of English law, 419–25.

65 It has been edited by Meeder, Sven: ‘The Liber ex lege Moysi: notes and text’, Journal of Medieval Latin xix (2009), 173–218 10.1484/J.JML.1.100550CrossRefGoogle Scholar at pp. 191–218.

66 The laws of Alfred (Jurasiski and Oliver edn), 347 n. 44. And see p. 69 for the possibility that material was updated to keep in step with ecclesiastical rather than secular law.

67 Fournier, ‘Le Liber ex lege Moysi’, 230–1; Wormald, The making of English law, 418–19; Pratt, The political thought of King Alfred, 230; Carella, ‘The source of the prologue’, 117–18.

68 Adair, Anya, ‘A troublesome source: the Liber ex lege Moysi and the Mosaic prologue to King Alfred’s Domboc ’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Review xxxv (2022), 213–17Google Scholar; The laws of Alfred (Jurasiski and Oliver edn), 64.

69 Carella, B., ‘Evidence for Hiberno-Latin thought in the prologue to the Laws of Alfred’, Studies in Philology cviii (2011), 1–26 10.1353/sip.2011.0002CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 The translation follows Jurasinski and Oliver’s.

71 On the witan, its judicial roles and the question of its recognition as the highest judicial authority see Levi Roach, Kingship and consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871–978: assemblies and the state in the early Mddle Ages, Cambridge 2012, 122–46.

72 Hibernensis 27.2 and Biblical Intro §13 add an exception to Exodus xxi.12–13 on killing a person unintentionally; Hibernensis 28.3 and Biblical Intro §24 both append the latter part of Exodus xxii.7 to Exodus xxii.3; Hibernensis 28.5 and Biblical Intro §25 both add a contingency to Exodus xxii.2 concerning killing a thief at night; Hibernensis H20.11 V19.11 (p. 96 ln. 14) and Biblical Intro §38 add the designation of the divinity (Domino / þu Gode) to Exodus xxii.29. The latter two have precedents in the Itala (Vetus Latina) Bible.

73 Annals of St-Bertin 856, trans. Janet L. Nelson, Manchester 1991, 83; Asser, Life of King Alfred §11, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, in Alfred the Great: Asser’s life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources, Harmondsworth 1983, 69–70. On the political context and implications of the wedding see Pauline Stafford, ‘Charles the Bald, Judith of England’, in Margaret Gibson and Janet L. Nelson (eds), Charles the Bald: court and kingdom, Oxford 1981,137–51; Janet L. Nelson, ‘The Franks and the English in the ninth century reconsidered’, in Paul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal (eds), The preservation and transmission of Anglo-Saxon culture, Kalamazoo, Mi 1997, 141–58 at pp. 141–8; Joanna Story, Carolingian connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c. 750–870, Aldershot 2003, 240–3.

74 Admonitio generalis, ed. and trans. H. Mordek, K. Zechiel-Eckes and M. Glatthaar, in Die Admonitio Generalis Karls des Großen, MGH, Fontes Iuris Germanici Antiqui in Usum Scholarum Separatim Editi 16, Hannover 2012, 179–242 at pp. 182–4. For discussion see Rosé, Isabelle, ‘Le Roi Josias dans l’écclésiologie politique du haut Moyen Âge’, Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome: Moyen Âge cxv (2003), 683–710 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 The most robust argument to this effect has been made by Pratt: ‘Alfred’s law-giving was a central act of Solomonic imitation informed by biblical wisdom’: The political thought of King Alfred, 214.

76 Janet L. Nelson, ‘The earliest surviving royal ordo: some liturgical and historical aspects’, in Brian Tierney and Peter Linehan (eds), Authority and power: studies on medieval law and government presented to Walter Ullman on his seventieth birthday, Cambridge 1980, 29–48 at p. 355. On the first ordo as witness to the West-Saxon predilection to the Solomonic model see Pratt, The political thought of King Alfred, 151–66, 170–6, 191–2, 280–95, 304–7, 317–21, 328–9, 334–42, 344–5, 349–50, and ‘The making of the second English coronation ordo’, 159.

77 The preface is translated by Keynes and Lapidge: Alfred the Great, 124–7.

78 Ibid. A detailed description of the manuscript’s contents is available in Flechner, Hibernensis, 133*–135*, and on the Bodleian Library’s website, at <https://a catalogue of western manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries and selected Oxford colleges/catalog/manuscript_6067>. accessed 20 July 2025.

79 The copy of the Admonitio in Hatton 42 omits the introduction with its reference to Josiah.

80 Wulfstan’s collection was edited by Cross and Hamer: Wulfstan’s canon law collection. Wulfstan’s handwritten notes in the manuscript were examined by N. R. Ker in ‘The handwriting of Archbishop Wulfstan’, in Books, collectors, libraries: studies in the medieval heritage, London 1985, 328–9. The manuscript evidence for Wulfstan’s use of the Hibernensis is discussed by Wormald, ‘Archbishop Wulfstan’, 196–203. The collection was recently renamed Collectio Wigorniensis by Michael Elliot in order to stress its Worcester connection: ‘New evidence for the influence of Gallic canon law’, 702 n 4.

81 Wormald, The making of English law, 425.

82 Hincmar, Speech at a synod at St Macra’s (881), printed as Capitula synodica §7, PL cxxv.1081B; Biblical Intro. 49.7, 8; Treschow, ‘The prologue to Alfred’s law code’, 103–4.

83 Jean Devisse, Hincmar archevêque de Reims, 845–882, Geneva 1975–6, iii. 1343–4. Some modified verses may have reached Hincmar from patristic sources that he quoted. See also Clementine Valette, ‘Gouverner le peuple chrétien: édition critique, traduction et commentaire des traités royaux d’Hincmar, archevêque de Reims (845–882)’, unpubl. PhD diss. Lyon II, 2014, 139. My thanks to Charles West for these references.

84 For specific references see Devisse, Hincmar archevêque de Reims, 1343–4.

85 The divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga: Hincmar of Rheims’s De divortio, trans. Rachel Stone and Charles West, Manchester 2016, 210.

86 Hincmar, Opusculum lv capitulorum, ed. Rudolf Schieffer, Die Streitschriften Hinkmars von Reims und Hinkmars von Laon, MGH, Conc. iv, suppl. ii, Hannover 2003, 130–361 at p. 250.

87 Heydemann, ‘The people of God’, 109.

88 Ibid.

89 On dating Remigius’ career see Pratt, The political thought of King Alfred, 61, 273.

90 Michael Gorman, ‘The encyclopedic commentary on Genesis prepared for Charlemagne by Wigbod’, Recherches Augustiniennes xvii (1982), 173–201 at p. 201. On Remigius and his exegetical œuvre see Colette Jeudy, ‘L’OEuvre de Remi d’Auxerre: état de la question’, in D. Iogna-Prat, C. Jeudy and G. Lobrichon (eds), L’Ecole carolingienne d’Auxerre de Murethach à Remi 830–908, Paris 1991, 373–96.

91 Remigius of Auxerre, Expositio super Genesim, ed. B. van Name Edwards, CCCM cxxxvi, Turnhout 1999, 211–50.

92 An edition is Pseudo-Philon, ed. Daniel J. Harrington, Charles Perrot, Pierre-Maurice Bogaert and Jacques Cazeaux in Pseudo-Philon: Les Antiquités bibliques, SC ccxxix–cccxxx, Paris 1976; an English translation is The Biblical antiquities of Philo, ed. M. R. James, New York 1971; Heil, ‘Theodulf, Haimo, and Jewish traditions’; Burton van Name Edwards, ‘Finding needles in haystacks: rabbinic exegesis in Carolingian Bible commentaries’, in Johannes Heil and Sumi Shimahara (eds), From Theodulf to Rashi and beyond: texts, techniques, and transfer in western European exegesis (800–1100), Leiden 2022, 163–82.

93 A useful starting point is Wittig, Joseph S., ‘King Alfred’s Boethius and its Latin sources: a reconsideration’, Anglo-Saxon England xi (1983), 157–98Google Scholar.

94 Pratt, The political thought of King Alfred, 273–6.

95 The debate is conveniently summed up by Rosalind Love, who also considers whether the commentary attributed to Remigius was known in England, in her ‘Latin commentaries on Boethius’s Consolation of philosophy’, in Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (eds), A companion to Alfred the Great, Leiden 2005, 82–110.

96 Pratt, The political thought of King Alfred, 292–3; Timothy E. Powell, ‘The “Three Orders” of society in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England xxiii (1994), 103–32.

97 Hibernensis, H14.8 V13.8 (Flechner edn), p. 56. Quoted therein are Eucherius, Instructionum ad Salonium libri duo §1, ed. C. Mandolfo, CCSL lxvi, Turnhout 2004, 97; Jerome, Commentary on Zachariah verse 2.8, ed. M. Adriaen, in Commentarii in Prophetas minores, CCSL lxxvi–lxxvi(a), Turnhout 1969–70, lxxvia. 56, line 498.

98 Browning, Dictionary of the Bible, 54.

99 For Jerome’s tally of canonical versus apocryphal books see his prologues to the Books of Kings and of Solomon (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs): Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam uersionem, ed. R. Weber and R. Gryson, Stuttgart 1994, 364–6, 957. Isidore’s discussion of the biblical canon is found in book 6 of the Etymologies (Isidori Hispalensis episcopi etymologiarum siue originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, Oxford 1911): 6.1.1–10 [on the division of the Bible], 6.2.1–49 [on the names and authors of biblical books], and 6.2.50–52 [on the apocrypha].

100 Samuel Berger, Histoire de la Vulgata pendant les premiers siècles du Moyen Age, Paris 1893, 145–84; Bonifatius Fischer, ‘Bibeltext und Bibelform unter Karl dem Großen’, in B. Bischoff (ed.), Karl der Große. Lebenswerk und Nachleben II: Das geistige Leben, Düsseldorf 1965, 156–216, and Die Alkuin-Bibel, Freiburg 1957; Heil, ‘Theodulf, Haimo, and Jewish traditions’.

101 Roger E. Reynolds, ‘Unity and diversity in Carolingian canon law collections: the case of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis and its derivatives’, in U.-R. Blumenthal (ed.), Carolingian essays, Washington, DC 1983, 99–135.