The laws, III Æthelred: zu Wantage 3, 1–3, were promulgated at the very end of the tenth century in the north of Wessex near the border with Mercia, at Wantage celebrated for a thousand years and more as Alfred the Great's birthplace. The evidence for the place of promulgation goes back to the manuscript of the twelfth century. The evidence for the date rests on Æthelred's charter to the Old Minster, Winchester. That is now regarded as authentic by those competent to judge. The evidence that Alfred was born at Wantage goes back ultimately to the single statement at the beginning of Asser's life of the king. One historian has recently expressed doubts that Alfred was born at Wantage, but these are based on not much other than that, in particular, Wantage ‘would then [in 849] have provided a most unsafe place for the lying-in of the wife of a West Saxon king’, though we know little about the arrangements for women, royal or other, during their confinement, and, in general, that single doubter's hope that ‘the status of Asser was to become a major political issue in Anglo-Saxon studies’.

It is unlikely that Wantage would have been invented as the place of promulgation (or, for that matter, as the place of Alfred's birth); at least no reason for a false localization is known to us. It is at once noticeable that the language of this part of the Laws of Æthelred has many Scandinavian loanwords.