In The Adventure of the Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes' account of 'the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime' epitomises the imaginative leap of circumstantial reasoning: probable meaning is deduced from what physical evidence remains (or is conspicuously absent) after the crime. This talk traces the pre-history of such methods of reasoning in the legal culture of early medieval England. Old English law codes and poetry alike, I argue, disclose a subtle but consistent interest in traces, signs, and probabilities: what we would now call circumstantial evidence. Commentators on early English legal history typically emphasise the primacy of oaths and ordeals in fact-finding. These ritualised procedures, it is claimed, centralise God’s judgement, and explicitly exclude human deduction and 'fact-finding' from the processes of law. Yet the Old English law codes preserve signs of a broader evidentiary culture: traces of stolen animals, collateral facts of behaviour, and expectations about likelihood and proof. Old English poetry, too, shows this intellectual habits at work. Narrative scenes in Beowulf pivot on the careful weighing of signs, and on conclusions drawn from material traces. Early English law and literature together point to a legal imagination alive to the interpretive potential of circumstantial evidence, anticipating by many centuries the processes of fact-finding that drive the modern jury trial, and the genres of detective fiction that bring these processes so vividly into the modern cultural imagination.

Dr. Adair is Assistant Professor in Law and Humanities with the Faculties of Law and Arts at the University of Hong Kong. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne and graduate degrees in English from Melbourne, Oxford and Yale. Her present research seeks to unite more closely the fields of medieval law and literature, and to provide insight into the intellectual, emotional and social dimensions of legal and literary production across the period.