1. See, for example, James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London and New York: Hambledon Press, 2000); Patrick Wormald, ‘Giving God and King their Due’ (1997), in his Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law as Text, Image and Experience (London: Hambledon Press, 1999), pp. 333–55.
2. See Naismith, European Medieval Coinage, pp. 211–68.
3. III Atr. 8.1; V Atr. 32.1. Discussed by Daniel Gorman, ‘Mutilation and Spectacle in Anglo-Saxon Legislation’, in Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. J. P. Gates and N. Marafioti (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), pp. 149–64.
4. III Atr. 16; IV Atr. 5, 5.3, 7.1, 7.3.
5. Elina Screen, ‘Anglo-Saxon Law and Numismatics: A Reassessment in Light of Patrick Wormald’s The Making of English Law’, British Numismatics Society, 77 (2007), pp. 161–2.
6. Robin Fleming, Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400–1070 (London: Allen Lane, 2010), pp. 290–317.
7. The reliability of the Chronicler’s escalating figures for the payment of tribute is debated by John Gillingham and M. K. Lawson in vols 104 and 105 (1989 and 1990) in the EHR. Lawson effectively answers Gillingham’s objections.
8. The monk Hemming, writing in the late eleventh century, claims that the church of Worcester had lost much of its gold and silver plate to pay ‘huge and unbearable’ royal taxes and tribute during the reign of Æthelred. Hemingi Chartularium, p. 248, quoted in Williams, pp. 229–30, n. 15.
9. Naismith, European Medieval Coinage, pp. 224 and 261–9.
10. Screen, ‘Anglo-Saxon Law and Numismatics’, pp. 152, 156 and 157.
11. Simon Keynes and Rory Naismith, ‘The Agnus Dei Pennies of King Æthelred the Unready’, ASE, 40 (2012), pp. 175–223.
12. Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia, ‘Council, King’s’ (B. A. E. Yorke).
13. For pledges of love and loyalty to kings, see III Edm. 1; V Atr. 35; VI Atr. 1; VIII Atr. 44.1; I Cn. 1, 20.
14. Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia, ‘Trinoda Necessitas’ (R. Abels).
15. The first reference to hundred courts is the ‘Hundred Ordinance’, traditionally called I Edgar. See Making of English Law, pp. 378–9.
16. I Edg. 1; III Edg. 5.
17. II As. 23; ‘Decree concerning hot iron and water’, in F. L. Attenborough (ed. and trans.), The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 140–41 and 170–71. For further discussion, see Sarah Larratt Keefer, ‘Đonne se Cirlisca Men Ordales Weddigeð: The Anglo-Saxon Lay Ordeal’, in Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. S. Baxter et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 353–67.
18. Tom Lambert, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 106–7 and 163–201.
19. III Edg. 6; IV Edg. 3; I Atr. 1.
20. II Cn. 20.
21. II As. 20, discussed in Lambert, Law and Order, pp. 153–6.
22. Making of English Law, pp. 320–45. Several ‘non-official’ legal texts, most if not all written by Archbishop Wulfstan, also date from Æthelred’s reign. See also the ‘Note on the Text’ in this current volume.
23. The translation is Wormald’s in his Making of English Law, pp. 336–7. For a sympathetic assessment of Æthelred’s legislative legacy, see M. R. Rambaran-Olm, ‘Trial by History’s Jury: Examining II Æthelred’s Legislative and Literary Legacy, AD 993–1006’, English Studies, 95 (2014), pp. 777–802.
24. I Atr. Preface, 1, 1.10; III Atr. Preface, 4.
25. II Atr. 7, 8.
26. Making of English Law, p. 326.
27. ‘Coronation Oath’, trans. Clayton, ‘Early English Laws’ website; Laws, pp. 42–3. A main topic in Anglo-Saxon law codes is the detection and punishment of theft, especially of livestock, which even more than homicide was thought to be the main threat to public peace. Lambert, Law and Order, pp. 207–10. The oath to judge justly and with mercy is alluded to in V Atr. 3 and VI Atr. 53.
28. IV Edg. 1.5; VII Atr. 6.3; Cn. 1020 (Cnut’s Proclamation of 1020), 11; II Cn. 69.
29. V Atr. 32.
30. Institutes of Polity, ch. 10, in Political Writings, p. 111.
31. Sean Miller (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Charters IX: Charters of the New Minster, Winchester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), no. 31, pp. 144–8, and A. G. Robertson (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Charters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), no. 63, pp. 128–9; EHD, pp. 531–2.
32. R. Abels, ‘ “The crimes by which Wulfbald ruined himself with his lord”: The Limits of State Action in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Reading Medieval Studies, 40 (2014; special issue: Law’s Dominion in the Middle Ages: Essays for Paul Hyams, ed. David Postles), pp. 42–53.
33. Simon Keynes, ‘Crime and Punishment in the Reign of Æthelred the Unready’, in People and Places in Northern Europe 500–1600: Essays in Honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer, ed. I. Wood and N. Lund (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1991), pp. 76–7. I tend to concur with Dorothy Whitelock (EHD, p. 47) that the narratives are included as justifications of Æthelred’s legal title to the properties. For alternative explanations, see Keynes, ‘Crime and Punishment’, p. 77.
34. I Edg. 3.1.
35. Keynes, ‘Crime and Punishment’, p. 79. See, for example, IV As. 3, concerning men of kin groups so powerful that they could break the law and harbour criminals with impunity.
36. Andrew Rabin, ‘Capital Punishment and the Anglo-Saxon Judicial Apparatus: A Maximum View?’, in Capital and Corporal Punishment, ed. Gates and Marafioti, pp. 181–200.
37. S 883.
38. I Atr. 4.2., for the prohibition of Christian burial for those who abet thieves.