Tom Lambert's book, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England, emerges at a time when the field of Anglo-Saxon legal studies has drawn increasing interest and, as a result, has been evolving in different, sometimes antithetical directions. Without question, the book will take its place among recent works that are shaping the field by deploying innovative approaches. Much about Law and Order deserves high praise, including Lambert's thoroughgoing self-consciousness about his methodology, his plan to tackle the Anglo-Saxon period in its entirety, and the novelty of his approach, including his willingness to apply techniques outside of the intellectual paradigm typically utilized by scholars in a field dominated by philological methods. Admirably, Lambert sets out to “…pursue an agenda shaped by Anglo-Saxon categories and practicalities rather than accepting the established priorities of the [secondary] literature” (20). He thus sets his focus on understanding the period on its own terms, rather than reading later legal developments retrospectively, because in his view many of the “existing historiographical priorities are skewed” (20). Lambert's work progresses for the most part chronologically, although it is nonetheless divided into two broadly thematic sections: “Foundations of the Anglo-Saxon Legal Order,” and “Order and ‘The State’ in Late Anglo-Saxon England.” Lambert's contribution, above all, is his thoughtful engagement with the primary sources synchronically with an eye for contemporary interests, and his stitching together of various insights into a cohesive narrative of Anglo-Saxon legal history.

Most striking about this book is Lambert's choice to investigate the laws “imaginatively” (13), a technique he attributes in part to anthropologists he spent time with while writing this book. He claims that “…just as we can fruitfully analyse fictional narratives without fretting about the fact that the events they describe never actually took place, so too can we analyse laws without agonizing about the extent to which they were enforced and obeyed” (14). It does not become clear exactly what Lambert means until later, when he introduces his first “fictional case” (39 ff.); that is, a purely hypothetical legal scenario invented by Lambert to help explain the (imagined) realities of Anglo-Saxon law in practice. Lambert's aim is to better understand the real-world functioning of the laws beneath their idealized, positive expression in the primary sources. Admittedly, Old English fictional narratives composed roughly contemporaneously with the Anglo-Saxon laws are different than the scenario concocted by modern scholars. Nevertheless, it is hard to argue that Lambert's fictional cases are without merit. They are clearly mapped to relevant primary and secondary sources (albeit a bit too sparsely) in footnotes that explain the rationale behind portions of his narrative. Readers will determine for themselves whether or not this technique is ultimately useful and convincing. At the very least, Lambert has introduced a new and daring approach to a field long overdue for a methodological shake-up.

Some will no doubt object to several matters central to Lambert's method and resulting argumentation. His belief, for example, that the “moral order underpinning [the laws] was not fundamentally Christian” (16) is at odds with the views of many in the field, including my own. What is more, it leads him to exclude or to overlook the important body of ecclesiastical witnesses to Anglo-Saxon legal culture—some Latin, some vernacular—which, if considered, would likely nuance, if not transform altogether, certain aspects of his arguments. Lambert's discussion of theft, for example, would be informed by reference to King Alfred's translation of of Exodus 22:2–3 in the Mosaic Preface to his law code, which alters scripture presumably to reflect contemporary Anglo-Saxon legal practice, as has been discussed in recent scholarship. Similarly, considering the ecclesiastical witnesses to Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence would help ameliorate the often-noticed problem that the surviving record is frustratingly incomplete, a point that Lambert acknowledges. Likewise, doing so might allow Lambert to avoid the misperception, implicit in the early chapters of his book, that early Anglo-Saxon law (that is, before the fall of all the independent kingdoms except Wessex in the late ninth century) was essentially homogeneous. To the contrary, recent scholarship has emphasized regional diversity.

These complaints do not detract from the overall quality of Lambert's insights, however. Lambert is at his best when he describes how the laws functioned in a real-world context, even when his imaginative conclusions rest on a degree of speculation. Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England is an excellent contribution to the field that will necessarily impact scholarship on the laws, and perhaps Old English studies more generally, for a long time to come.