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Anglo-Saxon law (Old English ?, later la?u "law"; dóm "decree, judgement") is a body of legal rules and customs that existed in England before the Norman conquest, and which, along with the Scandinavian laws and the continental German laws, are influenced in some degree upon earlier Germanic legal thought. The early Germanic law (leges barbarorum), including that of the territory now called Germany, was largely the product of Roman influence. The continuity of Roman life was almost completely broken in Britain, and even the Church, the direct heir of Roman tradition, did not carry on a continuous existence Canterbury was not a see formed in a Roman province in the same sense as Tours or Reims. One of the striking expressions of this Teutonism is presented by the language in which the Anglo-Saxon laws were written. They are uniformly worded in English, while continental laws, apart from the Scandinavian, are all in Latin. The English dialect in which the Anglo-Saxon laws have been handed down is in most cases a common speech derived from West Saxon — naturally enough as Wessex became the predominant English state, and the court of its kings the principal literary centre from which most of the compilers and scribes derived their dialect and spelling. Traces of Kentish speech may be detected, however, in the Textus Roffensis, the manuscript of the Kentish laws, and Northumbrian dialectical peculiarities are also noticeable on some occasions, while Danish words occur only as technical terms. At the conquest, Latin takes the place of English in the compilations made to meet the demand for Anglo-Saxon law texts as still applied in practice. It is easy to group the Anglo-Saxon laws according to the manner of their publication. They would fall into three divisions
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