| Sumario: | Prior to the reign of Alfred the Great, sanctuary protections appear to have been offered only by ecclesiastical buildings and restricted to those hoping to avoid punishment. Alfred's laws extend these protections even to private dwellings as well as to persons threatened with non-official forms of violence (such as feuds). They would thus seem to be innovative, yet scholarship has resisted the notion that these laws constitute reforms; some have been assumed to depend on much older Germanic folk-laws on feuding. The present article suggests that these laws show the king attempting to give the rituals and expectations of penance a more pronounced place in England's secular law, an aim more explicitly evident in other clauses of his code. The protection that these laws afford, it is argued, inheres not in the buildings in which the violence takes place but is instead contingent on the behaviour of disputants.
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