Anglo-Saxon law of legislation, though many technical terms from English for which Latin did not have an equivalent expression were retained. Anglo-Saxon law Anglo-Saxon law (Old English "ǣ", later "lagu" "law"; dōm "decree, judgment") is a body of written rules and customs that were in place during the Anglo-Saxon period in England, before the Norman conquest. This body of law, along with early Scandinavian law and Germanic law, descended from a family of ancient Germanic custom and legal thought. However, Anglo-Saxon law codes are distinct from other early Germanic legal statements – known as the "leges barbarorum", in part because they were
Dutch language of the local Germanic populace as opposed to Latin, the non-native language of writing and the Catholic Church. In the first text in which it is found, dating from 784, "theodisce" refers to Anglo-Saxon, the West Germanic dialects of Britain. Owing to commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries between England and the Low Countries, a cognate of "theodisk" (most likely Middle Dutch "Duutsc") was borrowed into English and developed into the exonym "Dutch", which came to refer exclusively to the people of the Netherlands. (A usage of the English term "Dutch" that includes German survives in