The law‐text known as I Æthelstan is commonly accepted as the earliest evidence of a legal obligation to pay tithes in England. As it turns out, it might not be. The extant Old English version of I Æthelstan does indeed legislate for tithe payments. However, this version is an eleventh‐century revision of the original text, probably penned by Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023). As I will argue in this article, the original version, which survives only as contained in a twelfth‐century translation into Latin, appears to be a call for a one‐off charitable alms payment.

It is commonly supposed that all Anglo-Saxon laws were composed in Old English. This article argues that the law-code in the name of King Ine of Wessex (r. 688–726) was written in Latin in his reign and only assumed its surviving Old English form in the ninth century when it was translated from Latin and appended to King Alfred’s law-code. Linguistic evidence indicates that Ine’s language is that of a ninth-century translator, possibly working with Alfred’s law-code, while its legal content is that of seventh-century Wessex. There are also several close parallels to continental legislation in Ine’s laws, both in language and in content. This article suggests that these may be the result of Frankish legislation serving as a model for or inspiration to the makers of Ine’s laws. The translation theory presented here explains many of the notorious linguistic peculiarities and problems of this text and its role within Alfred’s code.

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