Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

edicts and judgements 265
called, in a difficult phrase, decreta iudiciorum, literally ‘decrees of judgements’.
What Bede seems to be doing is combining two ideas which we would expect
to be kept quite separate: the edict of the lawgiver, the decretum, and the judgement
of the court, iudicium. Plummer observed that Bede had Old English
dōmas, ‘dooms’, in mind when he used the word iudicia, but this still leaves
unexplained the link with the other term, decreta. 21 A clue is offered by the
prologue to Hlothhere and Eadric, which declares that the two kings added
to the law (æ – ) that their forefathers made ‘these dōmas that follow hereafter’. 22
A dōm is, therefore, as much a decree promulgated by a king as a judgement
which a judge, dēma, might judge, dēman. 23 What Bede was doing with his odd
phrase, decreta iudiciorum, was to render the two aspects of the one English
word, dōm, both royal decree and judge’s verdict. One may compare the way
in which Gregory of Tours writes of ‘the judges’ promulgating an ‘edict’
concerning a fine for late appearance on a military expedition. 24
Much later, in the early tenth century, it would also be possible to use the
word dōmbōc – ‘doom-book’ – for Alfred’s lawbook, which provided the
fundamental text to which later kings added further decrees, very much as
Æthelberht’s Law seems to have been the fundamental text for seventhcentury
Kent. Such notions of a royal lawbook – a book of dōmas which
might be compared on the one hand with the Burgundian Liber
Constitutionum, ‘The Book of Decrees’, and on the other with the Visigothic
Liber Iudiciorum, ‘The Book of Judgements’ – cannot, however, be imported
into seventh-century Kent without severe qualification, for Wihtred, at the
end of the century, could speak of bōca dōm, without further qualification,
to refer to a rule in books of church law. 25 Wihtred’s law was carefully dated
and situated in a place, with its authority buttressed by a list of great men
who had met together on that occasion – all this going to show that it was
primarily the law promulgated in a royal assembly. The same contrast
between oral and written is part of contemporary perceptions of Irish law:
the ‘law of the written word’ is a term for ecclesiastical law. 26
Bede’s decreta iudiciorum may therefore be compared with the notion,
implicit in Hlothhere and Eadric’s Law, that they were promulgating dōmas
which were also to be the dōmas pronounced by judges, dēman. Both suggest
an intimate relationship between royal legislator and local judge. Yet Bede
also says, in a much-discussed phrase, that Æthelberht was legislating
21 In the comment on this passage in his edn, Baedae Opera Historica ii.87.
22 Liebermann, Gesetze,p.9. Æ, like riht, is collective, ‘law as a whole’, and thus entirely distinct from
dōm, ‘decree, judgement, fame’. The derived sense of ‘fame’, namely the judgement of contemporaries
and later generations upon a person, is already attested in Gothic doms; Skeireins, ed. W. Streitberg, Die
Gotische Bibel, 4th edn (Heidelberg, 1965) 459, 467 (ii.17, vi.16).
23 Cf. Cantwara dēeman, Hlothhere and Eadric, c. 8, ed. Liebermann, Gesetze p. 10.
24 Greg. Tur. Hist. vii.42. 25 Wihtred, c. 5, ed. Liebermann, Gesetze, i.12.
26 Corpus Iuris Hibernici ed. Binchy, p. 346; also ed. and trans. R. Thurneysen, ‘Aus dem irischen Recht,
IV’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 16 (1927) 175.
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