This chapter begins our examination of the origins of the common law. Many accounts – including that of Maitland – begin just before the Norman Conquest and explore how centralised authority had developed in the late Anglo-Saxon period. This is the focus of this chapter, which explores the debate as to the importance of this period by examining the characteristics of the late Anglo-Saxon legal system. This chapter will explore what the Anglo-Saxon inheritance was. The first section will look at the historical debate as to where the history of English law begins and the importance that should be placed on the Anglo-Saxon period. It will contrast the still influential approach of Maitland with more recent scholars, most notably Patrick Wormald. The second section will then outline what is considered to be the major achievement of the long Anglo-Saxon period as a whole: the move from feud to compensation. The third and final section will then explore how what we would call the legal system had developed by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. It will ask what did William the Conqueror inherit and to what extent this provided some foundation for the English common law.

In the Oresteia’s central scene, Cassandra tells of being cursed by Apollo to foretell the future but be disbelieved. The Trojan princess, who “cheated” the god in a violent sexual encounter, who survived her city’s extirpation, goes to her own known doom bravely, predicting Agamemnon’s death and vengeance to come. Yet there is an unexplored aspect to this famous and moving scene – Cassandra’s hint of her own continuation in the afterlife. It seems (eoika) to her that she will soon be singing prophecies in Hades. This chapter argues that attention to Cassandra’s potential afterlife changes how we view her prophecies of death and vengeance, her rebellion against Apollo and Clytemnestra, her bravery, her language of closure, and the ironies each of these entail. Moreover, the “poetics of plurality” uncovered in Cassandra’s statement and its uncertain status sophisticate and perhaps even reverse our understanding of her fate.