The existence of an oath of loyalty to the king in Anglo-Saxon legal texts has important corollaries for our understanding of King Edmund and his policies. In Edmund's Colyton Code, probably promulgated c. 946, there exists the following injunction:

This code has the earliest surviving text of an oath of loyalty to the king in the Anglo-Saxon corpus, and indeed is the first time the existence of such an oath is referred to so explicitly. Yet Edmund's oath has often been seen by historians, most notably Patrick Wormald, as simply an echo of an oath of general loyalty supposedly alluded to in the first clause of Alfred's domboc and subsequently referenced in Edward and Æthelstan's legislation. This assertion deserves re-examination. Wormald seems to have tried to interpolate certain societal conceptions of disloyalty into the early tenth century in order to explain later royal policies of land forfeiture. Yet if one bases oneself squarely within the evidence then the interpretation of certain clauses in the legislation of Alfred, Edward and Æthelstan referring to an oath of general loyalty is far more uncertain than is implied by elements of the current historiographical narrative. This in turn would suggest the singularity of Edmund's oath, which prompts questions about why such an oath might have first appeared in Edmund's reign, and what it might indicate about the concerns and ruling strategies of this king.

In the preparatory papers to his Making of English Law, Patrick Wormald turned to the supposed ‘oath of loyalty’ present in Alfred's law-code in order to eventually explain why such a large amount of land was forfeit in England on a wider variety of pretexts than on the continent.