A passage in the so-called Fonthill Letter, the record of a late ninth-century legal dispute, recounts that a judicial panel found in favor of one of the litigants because his testimony convinced its members that he was “nearer the oath” (aðe ðæs ðe near) than any of the other parties. This striking phrase is not unique to this text – a Latin analogue occurs in the record of a tenth-century dispute preserved in the Liber Eliensis – suggesting that, if not necessarily common, it was nonetheless a recognizable legal formula. The panel reached its judgment after each litigant “gave his account” (reahta heora ægðer his spell) and the defendant was permitted to present (geagnigean) the charters that validated his ownership. Underlying this passage is a complex interplay of narratives: the oral testimonies delivered by the litigants, the written histories recorded in the charters, and the panel's judgment concerning whose narrative would be authorized as “true” via legal ritual – that is, which narrative brought the litigant “nearer the oath.” The phrase is a potent one, evoking a courtroom setting where the stories presented are judged according to their proximity to the central oaths taken by the participants: the oaths themselves become palpable players in the drama.

This small detail from the Fonthill Letter provides just one illustration of the close relationship between the legal and the literary in pre-Conquest texts, though its recognition of the symbiotic connection between these two modes of discourse was hardly a new one. Plato's critique of the literary in the Republic represents an implicit acknowledgment of the normative power of narrative, while the discussion of the cathartic importance of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics is founded on the belief that narrative release was essential to the maintenance of a civil society. The courtroom speeches of Demosthenes and, later, of Cicero demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the place of narrative and literary style in legal advocacy (and invective). Perhaps most influentially, the Novellae constitutiones, the fourth component of the Corpus juris civilis, incorporate narrative as precedent to justify additions to the laws of Justinian. Given this pedigree, there can be little surprise that similar connections between law and literature can be found in texts produced in England prior to the Norman Conquest of 1066.