Fifty years have passed since I started to collect quotations from scholarly writings that struck me, at that time an undergraduate, as wholly unfounded in claiming to have found in the Christian literature of the Anglo-Saxons indelible vestiges of Germanic paganism, or in claiming to have discovered the paganisms the Anglo-Saxon authors appeared to have striven to conceal. Those teaching at Oxford, and among them those whose teaching I attended regularly were, however, not guilty of these misguided scholarly endeavours: my tutor, E. Stefanyja Olszewska (Mrs Alan S.C. Ross), a brilliantly sensitive and wide-ranging reader of Old and Middle English literature and of Icelandic literature, from whom I learnt everything that I was capable of learning, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Alistair Campbell.

I began reading widely in the scholarly writings on the Anglo-Saxon laws only in the last few years. I had noticed long ago that the Saxonists of Archbishop Matthew Parker' time and those who followed him looked back to their ancestors before the Norman Conquest for the civil liberty extinguished, as they thought, under the Normans and only slowly restored. King Alfred and the institution of trial by jury, supposedly in his reign, played a part in a venerative view of the Anglo-Saxon heritage and King Alfred' place in it. I did not know till fairly recently the range of reference to the supposed debt to the Anglo-Saxons for the institution of trial by jury, and not at all that it played a part in the politics of nineteenth-century Germany.