The Old English manuscript whose charred and burnt remains are now MS BL Cotton Otho B. xi was written at Winchester during the reign of Æthelred, partly in the middle of the tenth century and partly about the middle of the first half of the eleventh. In its pristine state it contained Anglo-Saxon texts of some importance, including a collection of laws. Unfortunately, the manuscript fell victim to the Cottonian fire of 1731 and was largely destroyed. Before the fire, however, in 1562, Otho B. xi was transcribed practically in its entirety by the antiquarian Laurence Nowell, whose work formed the basis for the printed edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws contained in William Lambarde's Archaionomiaof 1568.The present edition offers a brief discussion of the laws of the Anglo-Saxons as they survive in manuscripts and printed editions and then concentrates on the work of Nowell and Lambarde. Two Laurence Nowells and at least three Nowell transcripts of Cotton Otho B. xi are known to modern scholarship and require consideration before proceeding to an edition of what can be reconstructed of MS BL Cotton Otho B. xi. The texts of the law codes known as II Athelstan, V Athelstan, Iudex, and Alfred and Ine found originally in MS BL Cotton Otho B.xi are printed from the Nowell transcript contained in MS BL Additional 43703, while on facing pages the corresponding passages from Lambarde's Archaionomiaare reproduced. Variants from the other Nowell transcripts of the same texts are noted, manuscript relations are discussed in an appendix, and a select bibliography is offered. The importance of the present edition is that it makes it easier to compare the Otho B. xi text and Lambarde's printed version than is possible with Felix Liebermann's Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen. Comparison of the Nowell and Lambarde texts with one another shows that there can be little doubt that Lambarde for his Archaionomiaused Otho B. xi or a transcript of it made by Nowell Comparison of the Nowell and Lambarde texts with the other extant manuscript and printed versions casts some further light on the relations between the surviving law codes of the Anglo-Saxons.

A compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) as the world’s most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others, including parts of India and former French territories in North America, retained much of their previous legal regimes. As legal historian Christian R. Burset argues, determining how much English law a colony received depended on what kind of colony Britain wanted to create. Policymakers thought English law could turn any territory into an anglicized, commercial colony; legal pluralism, in contrast, would ensure a colony’s economic and political subordination. Britain’s turn to legal pluralism thus reflected the victory of a new vision of empire—authoritarian, extractive, and tolerant—over more assimilationist and egalitarian alternatives. Among other implications, this helps explain American colonists’ reverence for the common law: it expressed and preserved their equal status in the empire. This book, the first empire-wide overview of law as an instrument of policy in the eighteenth-century British Empire, offers an imaginative rethinking of the relationship between tolerance and empire.