I need ten souls brave enough to put in the time to learn enough Old English to read the laws of ¿¿elberht and ¿lfred (Athelbert and Alfred). I anticipate the first two-thirds of the course will be spent developing the language skills. We should be able by then to read passages from the Bible, chronicle entries, some short passages from saints¿ lives and perhaps even the stunningly powerful poem ¿The Battle of Maldon.¿ Then the laws. Here is one example from c. 600 AD: Gif man gekyndelice lim awirde¿, ¿rym leudgeldum hine man forgelde,¿ which translates literally: ¿if a man mutilates the natural limb (i.e., the penis), one must pay three times his price.¿ The law suggests that it is better to kill someone outright than dismember him piecemeal; at any rate it is cheaper. We might try to fathom what it means to legislate in 600 AD and why in the world someone would even want to do it. There will be supplemental secondary readings mostly in the legal historical genre.