The territory in the north-eastern part of England, distinguished by special legal and social systems was inherited from the Norwegian and Danish Vikings who conquered these lands in the 9th century. After the restoration of the power of the Anglo-Saxon kings over Danelaw at the beginning of the 10th century, Scandinavian law and customs were retained, and many were converted to general English practice. The specifics of the legal system of the north-east of England survived the Norman conquest and continued to exist throughout the Middle Ages.
The System
Before we continue this doesn’t explain how the Vikings conquered the territories. We have a whole article on this topic.
The threefold division of England according to the principle of applicable law in Wessex, Mercia and Danelaw arose during the reign of Cnut the Great (1016-1035), and if the Wessex and Mercian law differed from each other only in minor subtleties, then Danelaw was a very special territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Danelaw’s legal system was based on Scandinavian law. Attempts to unify the legal systems of both parts of the state, although made by some Anglo-Saxon monarchs, were inconsistent and did not lead to a significant convergence of legal systems.
Differences in the legal practice of the areas of Danish law from the rest of the country were quite numerous. Thus, in Danelaw, the penalty for killing a person was determined by his social status, and not the social status of his senior, as in other regions of the country. The punishment for crimes related to royal jurisdiction in Danelaw was significantly higher, and the sphere of offenses that constituted the exclusive competence of the royal courts was much broader. Scandinavian origin had many legal terms in Danelaw, as well as some judicial procedures.
The Danelaw administrative division was also different from the rest of England. The basic administrative-territorial unit was wapentake, not a hundred, as in other parts of the country, and the counties on the territory of Danish law emerged as areas occupied by individual Viking armies in the 10th century.
For the northern regions of Danelaw, its own system of the Werelds was characteristic, which had no analogues in Anglo-Saxon England and was distinguished by special detailing and enormous fines for the murder of aristocrats. A distinctive feature of the “Area of Five Burgs” was the extensive organization of the judicial system: from the Court of Five Burgas, through the courts of counties and wapentake to the court meetings of the villagers. It was in this region that a prototype of the jury arose, consisting of the twelve most reputable people who brought the defendant to court and participated in the approval of the sentence. The jury, which later became one of the most important features of English law, was of Scandinavian origin and was not known elsewhere in the country in the Anglo-Saxon period.
However, it cannot be said that the Danelaw legal system was directly borrowed from Scandinavia. So nothing is known about the application in the Danelaw of the right to Odal (inalienable family land ownership), which was one of the main distinguishing features of early medieval Scandinavian law. The Scandinavian Tings – people’s meetings also played a role. The Cnut legislation relating to Danelaw was already exclusively Anglo-Saxon.
The legal peculiarities of Danelaw reflected the uniqueness of the society that developed in the eastern regions of England, differing in ethnic composition and social structure from other territories of the kingdom.
The Structure
The main difference of Danelaw socially was the overwhelming prevalence of free peasantry in the population, while in other regions of England the proportion of free curls sharply decreased by the XI century, giving way to the dependent peasantry. Free farmers were descendants of soldiers and colonists of Scandinavian origin, settled on the East British lands in the IX century. However, there also remained a stratum of the Anglo-Saxons, who were guaranteed equality with the Danes by a treaty of 886.
The manorial type of economy also did not spread in the areas of Danish law, and the feudalization of the socio-economic system proceeded at a much slower pace than in the rest of the country. At the same time, economically Danelaw, and especially Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire, was one of the most prosperous regions of England: Scandinavian settlers turned wastelands and forests into arable land and somewhat improved the culture of agricultural production. The Scandinavian plowland came to replace the Anglo-Saxon guide as the base unit of the land plot, which corresponds to the territory treated for eight bulls a year.
Among the free peasantry of the areas of Danish law, a special category of peasants the sokomen ( English sokeman ) —was distinguished who, being personally free, were obliged to perform some non-burdensome duties to their lord (small annual rent, help in the fields during harvest). Sokmen had full ownership of their land plots and could dispose of them at their discretion, Sokmen’s relationship with their lord was purely contractual, and the dependence was extremely weak. The main feature of the co-change status, expressed in the very name of this stratum, was that they filed lawsuits not in the royal court, but in the court of the seigneur, to whose jurisdiction the territory of the co-change was assigned. The social contrast of Leicestershire in the 11th century, with its 2,000 sokomen, and neighboring Warwickshire, where there was not a single sokmen, reflected the fundamental differences between Danelaw and the rest of the country. After the Norman conquest, the Sokmen gradually lost their special status and merged with the total mass of dependent peasants, but in East Anglia and the “Five Burgs” they survived until the late Middle Ages.
Sources:
Morton, AL The History of England
Musset, L. Barbaric invasions of Europe: The second wave
Hadley, DM The Northern Danelaw: Its Social Structure
Stenton, F. Anglo-Saxon England