Britons in early Wessex: The evidence of the Law Code of Ine

One of the 'facts' about the modern study of Anglo-British relations is the extent to which the historian, generally speaking, is afforded a very circumscribed array of references with which to work, and the more so for the early Anglo-Sax.on period. Certainly, a reasonable corpus of material survives which can be accessed to inform an understanding of how Anglo-Saxons and Britons· may have interacted with one another, but the issue has to be approached by examining often peripheral and sometimes incidental references in a range of texts written for a variety of different purposes. And when attention is focussed specifically on the investigation of putative Britons living within Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the selection from which to choose narrows quite substantially. It is in this context that the Law Code of Ine, king of Wessex c.688·,-726, deserves particular attention as it provides a rare glimpse of Britons living within an AngloSaxon kingdom around the turn of the eighth century. It also reveals a different view of relations between Britons and West Saxons to the unremittingly bellicose narrative enumerated in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. My aim in this paper is, therefore, to discuss Ine's Code and what it implies for relations between Britons and Saxons in early Wessex.