The Laws of London? IV Æthelred in Context

The law-code known as ‘IV Æthelred’ has been identified since the mid-nineteenth century as a text concerned with tolls, trading and currency in London, dated to around the year 1000. This contribution argues that ‘IV Æthelred’ may have had little if anything to do with Æthelred II (978–1016). By re-evaluating the law-code’s transmission, contents and date, it is proposed that the text consists of two distinct segments, probably put together around 1100 and surviving only in Latin translation. One part is a series of tenth-century decrees on currency crimes, and represents the most detailed statement on this topic to survive from Anglo-Saxon England. The other relates more specifically to London, laying out the tolls incurred by merchants coming to the city from across northern Europe. Frequent use of French terminology marks this portion of the text out, and suggests a date in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest.

3 For Liebermann, it was the interest in towns, trade and minting that held 'IV Atr' together as a whole. 7 It is certainly true that these themes are treated together in other lawcodes. But the jolting shifts in content, tone and phrasing over the course of 'IV Atr' have prompted subsequent observers to argue that it might in fact be a composite, put together from at least two distinct parts. 8 The first of these (here designated 'IV Atr A': ch. 1-4.2 in the traditional chapter numeration) has excited the most interest. Its two opening chapters consist of specific statements on trading arrangements in London. These begin with an assertion that guards should keep watch at Aldersgate and Cripplegate. There follows a remarkable passage on how much toll should be paid by various merchants for all sorts of commodities. Traders in London came from all over northern Europe: those of Rouen, Flanders, Ponthieu, Normandy and Francia are singled out, as well as others from specific towns in the Low Countries (Huy, Liège and Nivelles) and a group referred to as 'the men of the emperor' (homines imperatoris) who had especially wide-ranging privileges. 9 Other tolls relate to the goods that were being brought to London. These include the timber, cloth, fish and wine of foreign merchants, as well as goods that would presumably have been sourced more locally: hens, eggs and dairy products sold by women. The latter portion of 'IV Atr A' (ch. 3-4.2) shifts away from the London-specific interests of the earlier material to more general regulation of toll payments and violence within towns. The possibility exists that these chapters once formed a separate text, though it is associated with the earlier chapters by use of French vernacular vocabulary (discussed below). Moreover, the last chapter of this section switches from the impersonal statements that characterise the rest of 'IV Atr A', to a first-person plural 'we', presumably the Londoners, moving back to a more localised perspective. 10 The second portion of 'IV Atr' ('IV Atr B': ch. 5-9.2) consists of a strongly coherent series of declarations about minting and currency. Its most prominent concerns are the 4 maintenance of the coinage and protection against forgery. Various currency crimes are singled out, from actually making counterfeit coin by imitating the name of another moneyer, to refusing good coin, passing on bad coin or being complicit in any such act. Provision is also made for those who are caught with bad money but claim that they did not know they were handling forgeries (ch. 7-7.2). The punishment fitted the crime, in that these wrongdoers would be required to 'pay the penalty of their carelessness' (habeat … dampnum illud ex incuria sua) by exchanging their defective coins for others which are 'pure and of good weight' (purum et recte appendens), doubtless at a very unfavourable rate (see Figure   1). Figure 1: a rare specimen of a forged penny made during the Anglo-Saxon period, probably in the early/mid-1050s. It is modelled on Edward the Confessor's Expanding Cross type, butas with several other contemporary forgeriesthe names of the moneyer and the mint-place on the reverse are nonsensical. This specimen was found at Cricklade, Wiltshire, and is recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme  therefore, was available to another compiler of legal texts active around the same time as 'Quadripartitus' was being put together. This is one of several minor yet telling differences within the otherwise similar selection of texts that underpins both collections. The Textus Roffensis passage on moneyers is not found in the 'Quadripartitus' version of 'III AEthelred', while Textus Roffensis also reverses the order of the two penultimate clauses of 'III AEthelred', 11 and relocatesas what Patrick Wormald called 'space fillers'two other short passages that conclude 'III AEthelred' in 'Quadripartitus' (discussed below). 12 In other words, 'IV Atr' circulated around 1100 as one of several accretions to 'III AEthelred' which might vary from compilation to compilation. But one suspects that the exemplar of Textus Roffensis (or its predecessor) contained more of the Old English version of 'IV Atr B'. As 'III AEthelred' is of fairly miscellaneous structure, especially in its later sections, it seems much more likely that a passage was lifted from a text dealing with monetary matters (i.e. 'IV Atr B') than that the rest of 'IV Atr B' was constructed around a borrowing from a more diverse set of laws.
There is no sign of 'IV Atr A' having been in the exemplar of Textus Roffensis, meaning that there is no way to tell if it always travelled with 'IV Atr B'. In itself this is of 6 limited significance: only so much can be gleaned from the lone sentence in Textus Roffensis. When placed alongside the second and fuller route in the transmission of 'IV Atr', however, it contributes to significant doubts about the integrity of the text. 'Quadripartitus' is a compilation of Anglo-Saxon legal material put together somewhere in southern England around the end of the eleventh century or the beginning of the twelfth. 13 All the texts constituting 'Quadripartitus' were rendered into somewhat idiosyncratic Latin, but are still peppered with vernacular terms. 14 The earliest manuscript of 'Quadripartitus' (Dm in Liebermann's designation: London, British Library, Cotton Domitian VIII, ff. 96-110v), dating probably to the first quarter of the twelfth century, is unfortunately truncated, so only contains the first few items of the collection. It is impossible to know whether it would also have included 'IV Atr'. However, the text appears in all four other early copies. 15 These manuscripts, dating from the mid-to late twelfth century, consistently place 'IV Atr' in the same cluster of texts. This opens with 'III AEthelred', which is explicitly ascribed to a meeting overseen by King AEthelred at Wantage, Berkshire (probably in 997), 16 and continues with two very brief anonymous texts that may have been appended to 'III AEthelred' at an earlier stage in transmission: Pax, which spells out exactly how far the king's peace extends from his person; and Walreaf, on the penalties for grave-robbing. 'IV Atr' comes next. In all witnesses it is followed by the law-code 'II AEthelred', which is also quite miscellaneous in content, though without ever giving the impression that it made up part of a contiguous unit with what came before. 17 The relationship of the manuscript witnesses to 'Quadripartitus' is a tangled mess.
The compiler may well have been actively amending, rearranging and adding to the collection over time, and his or her efforts could have been further compounded by the interventions of subsequent scribes. 18 Two main families can be discerned with reference to 'IV Atr' (leaving aside a legal collection made at London in the early thirteenth century 7 which drew on 'Quadripartitus' but did not include 'IV Atr'). 19 The first group gives no indication at the opening of 'IV Atr' that a separate text has begun, implying that the whole was the work of AEthelred. Also characteristic of this group are chapter headings for the whole cluster of texts running from 'III AEthelred' to the end of 'IV Atr'. One copy (Hk: London, British Library, Additional 49366) numbers everything as chapters I to XXIV; another (M: Manchester, John Rylands University Library, Lat. 420) has the same numeration, but only in a chapter list preceding 'III AEthelred'. In contrast, the other family offers a stronger sense that 'IV Atr' is a distinct text. T (London, British Library, Cotton Titus A.XXVII) places enlarged, coloured initials at the beginning of 'III AEthelred' and (after Pax and Walreaf) 'IV Atr' (140r and 141r), implying that the latter formed a discrete item.
There are no internal breaks within 'IV Atr'. R (London, British Library, Royal 11.B.II) has a similar layout but recognises 'IV Atr' as another work of AEthelred, for it starts the text with an enlarged initial and the rubric item rex Lvndonie (156v).
Liebermann and Wormald argued that on the whole rubrication of the sort applied in Hk and M was more likely to have been removed than introduced by copyists, and hence that these witnesses perhaps reflect the most finished form of the collection. 20 If so, the stronger distinction between 'IV Atr' and what preceded it in T and R might be seen as the earlier, less polished side of the tradition, and perhaps closer to the Old English source. But it is not out of the question that a shared intermediary of Hk and M added rubrics across the collectionand in any case this may or may not have any bearing on the form of 'IV Atr' which the 'Quadripartitus' compiler first encountered. Precious little about the latter can be said for sure, but two points stand out. First, the text was associated in transmission with 'III AEthelred', Pax and Walreaf, and followed by 'II AEthelred'. This may have been enough to suggest the attribution to AEthelred II given in R, 21 but it should not be taken for granted that the original material was in fact a product of AEthelred's reign. Second, although there was 8 ambiguity on the division between 'III AEthelred' and 'IV Atr', there is no hint of major breaks within 'IV Atr' in any of the 'Quadripartitus' manuscripts. The compiler presented what he or she found as a unit.
Confronted with a crime scene so contaminated it is not even possible to be sure how many crimes it has witnessed, it is better to fall back onto the individual elements of the text identifiable through scrutiny of their contents. As the two discernible parts each present quite different problems, they will be discussed in order of appearance, even though this means they probably fall in reverse chronological sequence.

London and its Tolls: 'IV AEthelred A'
This first section of 'IV Atr A' is the portion which has attracted most attention, as an apparent window onto the traders and commodities that flowed into the city in the age of AEthelred II. 22 Archaeological discoveries have gone a long way towards substantiating its testimony. Ships from the Netherlands were taken apart for timber to shore up the Thames in the age of AEthelred II and Cnut, and goods from Germany, France and beyond have been found. 23 The breadth and importance of late Anglo-Saxon London's trade are therefore not in doubt. The relevance of 'IV Atr A' to the time of AEthelred II, however, is. In 2008, Derek Keene suggested that it could be a composition of the twelfth century. 24 This was the era in which London's liberties and international standing took on a whole new complexion, reflected in a string of other documents, not least a famous charter, supposedly issued by Henry I (1100-35), which spelled out the Londoners' extensive privileges and exemptions. 25 'IV Atr A' shares an interest in London's rights, in that one of the primary purposes of the toll list was probably to define in negative the benefits of those who were not subject to special arrangements: that is to say, the Londoners themselves. Defence of their interests was at the heart of this part of the document, made most explicit in asserting the right of preemption (forceapum, ch. 2.10) over foreigners, and in claiming an additional fine on breaking the peace beyond that due to the king (ch. 4.2).
In this respect the London list has much in common with other statements on tolls from the tenth century onwards, which singled out specific incoming groups and commodities for attention. 26 The Raffelstetten inquest on tolls at a crossing of the Danube in 903×906 lays out the tolls on specific commodities such as horses, slaves and salt which were paid by various groups coming from inside and outside the kingdom. 27 Another toll-list from eleventh-century Koblenz assigns fees in money, animal skins, fish or wine to traders from named places all over the empire; like the London toll list, it ends with trade-specific fees for bakers and cobblers. 28 The Honorantie civitatis Papie, composed in Italy in the early eleventh century but reflecting earlier conditions, imposes a wide range of tolls on traders of various kinds, ranging from monetary and in-kind payments to a collective lump sum paid by the English every three years consisting of £50 of silver, two hunting dogs and various pieces of arms and armour. 29 In the twelfth century, a detailed list of tolls on different types of ship and commodity from Flanders was assembled to answer the complaints of Cologne merchants, who felt they were being treated inconsistently and unjustly. 30 All of these texts derive from complex and contested situations in which obligations had to be defined: the London list was probably no different, though the circumstances behind it are obscure. It is best interpreted as an enterprise of the Londoners themselves. The only direct references to the king come at the end of 'IV Atr A', in connection with fines for withholding toll and breaching the peace. In the latter case, a supplementary fine of 30s. was expected 'if [the offender] values the goodwill of the town itself' (si curet amicitiam ipsius porti, ch. 4.2) and 'if the king will grant us this concession' (si rex hoc concedat nobis); that is to say, an additional layer of protection was provided by the urban authorities, but it was a sensitive enough matter to need royal permission. This section of 'IV Atr A' has clear parallels in the Anglo-Saxon era, and is reminiscent of the dialogue between local and royal authority exemplified by AEthelstan's (924-39) legislation. Breach of protection in a town was not a common subject in Anglo-Saxon legislation, 31 but it has much in common with laws on keeping the peace in other settings. The fine of £5 for breaching the king's protection, for instance, had been widespread in England (save the Danelaw) since the time of Alfred. 32 The same fine was also required from those who claimed to have paid toll, but could not find anyone to vouch to warranty.
'IV Atr A' therefore has many parallels in terms of content, yet it does not contain any explicit statement on its date or origin. The attribution of the text to (usually) 'c. 1000' derives from its placement immediately after 'III AEthelred' in surviving manuscripts, and has been repeated since the mid-nineteenth century. 33 In several respects a date in the middle of the reign of AEthelred II is compatible with internal details. Contacts with the regions named in ch. 2 can be traced from this time. The towns of Huy, Liège and Nivelles listed in ch. 2.7 were in the midst of a period of expansion, which had in all three cases commenced by the end of the tenth century and was well under way in the eleventh. 34 None of these points would preclude a later date in the early or mid-twelfth century, at which point trade between London and northwest Europe was booming. The manuscript background of 'IV Atr A' is more telling. Keene noted that 'IV Atr' does not occur in the earliest copy of 'Quadripartitus', so in principle could have been inserted into the collection after it began to circulate in or soon after October 1106. But, as mentioned above, the earliest copy is cut off in the midst of only its second item. It is also difficult to reconcile the rest of the manuscript tradition with a late insertion. The four mid-and late-twelfth-century copies all contain essentially the same text of 'IV Atr', framed in much the same general style as the rest of the 'Quadripartitus' collection, 35 albeit with slight differences in handling which point to active tinkering on the part of the compiler and subsequent copyists. 36 There is no indication that all four of these manuscripts come from the same location (though only one can actually be attributed to a specific origin). 37 The text is firmly rooted in the knotty morass at the core of 'Quadripartitus', and hence consideration of the origins of 'IV Atr' needs to begin with the genesis of the collection as a whole. 'Quadripartitus' was put together at the end of the eleventh century and in the very earliest years of the twelfth. It is likely, therefore, that 'IV Atr' already existed before 1100. What is less clear is the form in which the 'Quadripartitus' translator found 'IV Atr A'. It is situated in the first (and much longer) of two sections of 'Quadripartitus', which is said in the argumentum to have been translated from Old English. 38 Where they are datable, the texts in this section belong to the time of William I (1066-87) or before. They are followed by a second selection of more recent Latin material. These two parts probably correspond to the first and second of what the compiler expected to be four sections.
Evidently this plan evolved in execution: the other two sections apparently never came into being, and it is also possible, in the case of 'IV Atr A', that the intention to translate only Old English texts fell by the wayside. One of the most distinctive features of this text is a diverse vernacular background, suggesting that the 'Quadripartitus' source text may not have been straightforwardly Old English. 39 As was common in 'Quadripartitus', 'IV Atr A' contains a significant number of Old These French words could conceivably have been introduced by the 'Quadripartitus' translator, who is thought to have been a native speaker of French rather than English. Items of French vocabulary occur in other 'Quadripartitus' texts, but not in the same quantity as in 'IV Atr A' or (usually) in the same highly technical contexts. 42 'IV Atr A' is the only text in the first part of 'Quadripartitus' to contain so many pieces of French vocabulary in close proximity, and they show no obvious sign of being glosses. One thus suspects that there was something different about the text which the translator was faced with. Most probably it was an Old English text laced with French vocabulary, for it has the same syntactic quirks as many other 'Quadripartitus' texts known to be translated from Old English. A more or less even blend of Old English and French should not be ruled out as an alternative possibility, though if so it would be the oldest known (mostly) French administrative document from England by a significant margin. 43 There was certainly potential for contact between English and French before 1066, 44 and a cosmopolitan place like London (which had a Norman bishop in the period 1051-75) might have been at the forefront of such developments, but the extent of contact seen in 'IV Atr A' is surely more compatible with a post-Conquest date. The period between 1066 and 1100 is the most likely candidate. At this time, Old English and its legal specificities were still widely understood, but French had become the primary language of the elite. 45 In the 13 context of London, French-speakers were becoming a more numerous and influential constituency. There was an array of port-reeves after 1066 with continental or French names, 46 and as probable French-speakers dealing with a city of largely English-speaking inhabitants and run by a well-established set of Anglo-Saxon institutions, they would have been exactly the sort of community to produce a text like 'IV Atr A'.

The Coinage Laws: 'IV AEthelred B'
'IV Atr B' is the most detailed single statement about the legal aspects of the English monetary system from before the later twelfth century. It is only here that one finds out how forged coins and the different ways of making and handling them would be treated in practice. These provisions demonstrate deep concern for the integrity of the coinage, which was founded on supervision of moneyers and coin-users by those in positions of power. The text gives the impression of being a set of royal decisions reached in dialogue with a community, probably of legally and politically influential individuals rather than moneyers themselves. Indeed, at its outset 'IV Atr B' decrees that the first clause represents what an unspecified group has stated (dixerunt), but subsequent references to omnes sapientes (ch. 5.1) and occurrences of the first-person plural (e.g. praecipimus, ch. 6) suggest that this group is a body working with the king, who emerges more strongly later in the text: he is described (in the third person, ch. 8) as urging (suadet) his bishops, earls and reeves into action, while the last clauses of the text mention pecunia mea (ch. 9.2) and include a direct address from the king to an audience who have chosen to obey (sicut vos docere praecipio et omnes elegimus, ch. 9.3). The complicated perspective in this short text suggests an extract from a longer document framed as a dialogue between the king and an unspecified group. 47 In a general sense, there is little doubt that 'IV Atr B' belongs to the same world as Anglo-Saxon coinage laws from the early eleventh century and before. Its provision that offending moneyers should be subjected to ordeal harks back to a law of 'II AEthelstan' (ch. 14.1), as does the expectation that, if found guilty, the moneyer's hand should be cut off and mounted above the mint-building where he committed the crime. 48 Similarly, 'III Edgar' (ch. 8) and 'II Cnut' (ch. 8)and before them several pieces of Carolingian legislation 49lay down that no-one should refuse the king's legitimate coinage, though it is only 'IV Atr B' which spells out that those who do reject good coins would be subject to the fine (probably 120s.) for overhirnessa ('disobedience' or 'insubordination') which resulted from dereliction of a variety of legal duties to the king and other bodies. 50 There are several precedents for short pieces of legislation primarily focused on money and related issues. 'IV Atr B' compares closely to the coin-related section of 'II AEthelstan', which is thought to represent a pre-existing text concerned with minting and urban matters; 51 more distantly, it is reminiscent of a fragmentary capitulary of Louis the Pious (814-40) which appears to have been dedicated to monetary affairs. 52 Like 'IV Atr B', both appear to have been directed at individuals with authority over minting. But these parallels do not bring a date or context for 'IV Atr B' within easy reach, and neither do many other aspects of the text, however specific they may seem.
On the face of it, the statement that there should be fewer moneyers than before, with three in every 'principal town' (summo portu) and one in 'every other town' (omni alio portu) (ch. 9), might be expected to have left a noticeable impact among surviving coins (see Figure 2). Yet at no point in the reign of any king from AEthelstan onwards was the maximum number of moneyers in all mint-towns three: Chester, Lincoln, London, Winchester and York, in particular, all consistently had more. 53 The injunction could have been directed at a particular region, 54 though no portion of the kingdom stands out as an obvious candidate.
Assuming the law exempted major towns, a significant proportion of the others could have had one or three moneyers operating at any one time between Edgar's reform and the middle 15 of AEthelred's reign (i.e. the Long Cross type, probably issued in the early/mid-990s). 55 But it is equally possible that either this law was never put into force, or was intended more as a general principle. 56 Figure 2: a map of all identifiable mint-places named in England between c. 900 and 1066. Not all were active simultaneously. Drawn by the author.
One suspects that this was also the case with the law on regularisation of weights at 15 oras to the pound, based on the standard of the king himself (ch. 9.2). Famously, there is no impression of metrological standardisation in the late Anglo-Saxon coinage, which was marked by sharp variation between issues, regions and individual mint-places. 57 Use of a Scandinavian unit to specify the standard is also of limited significance. The ora (a sub-unit of the mark) was initially a feature of the Danelaw after its first appearance in the late ninth century. 58 By 1032, however, and possibly already in the 980s the markand, by implication, the orawas being regulated by the Husting in London, and was current across eastern England from the mid-tenth century. 59 Somewhat more helpful is the remark (in ch. appeared in mid-eleventh-century charters from the west midlands. 61 But there are strong reasons to believe that the text dates to the tenth century, in which case these Danes were more likely the inhabitants of the 'Danelaw' in eastern England. The best evidence for the tenth-century origins of 'IV Atr B' comes from connections with passages of 'III AEthelred', issued c. 997 at Wantage. 62 The latter stipulates (ch. 8) that the death penalty awaits forgers of coin 'after it was forbidden' (syððan hit forboden waes).
This could refer back to the laws of AEthelstan some sixty years earlier, though if 'IV Atr B' (ch. 5.3) had recently been set down, it would make a much more recent and likely point of reference. 63 This might also go some way towards explaining the cross-contamination between the Textus Roffensis version of 'III AEthelred' and 'IV Atr B' discussed above: the one passage they share does indeed relate to the execution of moneyers, as if the compiler (or a subsequent copyist) sought to include further support from a pre-existing law-code. The two texts' structuring of the penalties for currency crime lends further support to the argument that 'III AEthelred' post-dates 'IV Atr B'. The section of 'IV Atr B' on penalties for coinagerelated crimes (ch. 5-5.4) places the death sentence into an escalating hierarchy of severity. It specifies that the 'full ordeal' (pleno ordalio) should be undertaken by all those accused of counterfeiting, providing bullion to counterfeiters or making dies carrying false details for nefarious moneyers to use (as in Figure 1). Further penalties were reserved for the counterfeiters themselves. A distinction was drawn between moneyers who produced forged coin at their workshop or mint (moneta), who would lose a hand and have it mounted on the building where the crime was committed, and those working 'in woods … or other such places' (in nemoribus … vel alicubi similibus), who would lose their lives unless saved by the king's mercy. This additional severity probably reflects the magnitude of forgery that such seclusion would imply: minting, along with trading, depended heavily on openness and trust, which is partly why there was an added element of display in the urban moneyer's punishment. 64 The hierarchy of ordeal, mutilation and death is significantly reconfigured for similar crimes in 'III AEthelred' and also 'II Cnut'. 'III AEthelred' (ch. 8) expands the 'full ordeal' into the 'threefold ordeal' (þrimfealdan ordale) for all moneyers accused of forgery, and adds that anyone found guilty should be killed. This is a step beyond 'IV Atr B', and follows a pattern of 'III AEthelred' enhancing the severity of punishments spelt out in previous law-codes, including 'I AEthelred' as well as (probably) 'IV Atr B'. 65 Moral outrage at forgery was also at a higher pitch in the last Anglo-Saxon legal text to deal with coinage, 'II Cnut' (c. 1020). 66 This declares (ch. 8) that those who forged coin should lose a hand, with no possible recourse, while the 'triple oath' (þryfealdre lade) or ordeal was reserved for reeves accused of collaborating; if they were found guilty, they too would lose a hand. Like 'IV Atr B', 'II Cnut' follows this with a more general injunction to keep weights and measures to the proper standard (ch. 9). A progression of severity can thus be seen, moving from the relatively granular provisions of 'IV Atr B' into readier execution in 'III AEthelred' and restriction of ordeals to accomplices in 'II Cnut'.
The strength of such comparisons is limited -'II Cnut', after all, retreats from the death penalty of 'III AEthelred' -but it is nonetheless likely that 'III AEthelred' and 'II Cnut' were produced with reference to 'IV Atr B' or something very similar to it, and strengthened its penalties. If so, it must have been in existence before c. 997. Patrick Wormald's suggestion that the laws stem from a meeting at Bromdun early in the reign of AEthelred II is therefore plausible, though this is by no means the only possibility. 67 Use of the term oferhyrnesse associates 'IV Atr B' with the age of Edward the Elder and AEthelstan, and the latter king's reign in particular was a fertile period for local legislation. But oferhyrnesse did appear occasionally under later kings, and provision for Danes and English can only be paralleled in the tenth century under Edgar. One law-code from his reign specified that the Danes were entitled to their own laws while the English were subject to those made by the king and his ancestors, whereas some decrees applied to the whole kingdom, including English, Danes and Britons. 68 The last and longest portion of 'IV Atr' should thus be seen as a tenth-century text, with a chance of being from the first half of AEthelred II's reign, though a date in the time of Edgar should not be ruled out. 69

Conclusion
The steps behind the composition and transmission of 'IV Atr' are murky, but a reconstruction can be hazarded. The portion of the text designated 'IV Atr B' probably existed as a unit in the later tenth century. It was seemingly consulted in the composition of 'III AEthelred' around 997, and appended in whole or in part to subsequent copies of the latter code. 'Textus Roffensis' reflects a branch of the tradition which associated an Old English version of 'IV Atr B' with 'III AEthelred'. Whether 'IV Atr A' existed at this stage, and whether it had yet been attached to 'IV Atr B', is not clear. The latter portion of 'IV Atr A' (ch. 3-4.2) could also have had a separate prior existence, but only survives alongside the first, London-specific chapters of the code, as part of a linguistically distinct text notable for its French vocabulary. London is the obvious candidate for where this composition came into being. Its date is less easy to pin down, but sometime in the decades after 1066 seems most likely.
'IV Atr' as a whole forms part of a block of material in 'Quadripartitus' that begins with 'III AEthelred', follows seamlessly with Pax and Walreaf, and then proceeds to 'IV Atr'.
There is some ambiguity in the early 'Quadripartitus' manuscripts as to whether 'IV Atr' was a distinct text or part of 'III AEthelred'. Combined with the preservation of just one sentence in Textus Roffensis, this might point to a layout in the underlying material that allowed for multiple interpretations of its order and coherence: the 'Quadripartitus' compiler-translator perhaps encountered extensive additions in the margins to a copy of 'III AEthelred', or on a mostly blank folio at its end.
In any case, this was probably the setting in which 'IV Atr' in its current form came into being, as a composite created for 'Quadripartitus' or shortly before; one which demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of Anglo-Saxon law. It is a highly targeted piece of legislation on issues relating to towns and trade. The rationale that tied its contents together had deep roots in earlier tenth-century law: tolls, trading, urban affairs and minting were all established as bedfellows. 'IV Atr' is best understood as a dossier of related but originally distinct materials that was put together in multiple stages for specific purposes in 20 particular contexts. This 'cut and paste' approach was versatile, but places significant obstacles in the way of tracing what those purposes and contexts were.