Peculiarities of old English legal word stock correlated with historical and legal realia of Anglo-Saxon states
The article explores the cumulative function of legal terms that have fixed and keep the information about historical and legal realia of early feudal Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The diachronic role of the semantic variation that has developed in modern legal terms is shown on the material of Old English legal texts. The author studies archaic legal words that have become obsolete, as well as the historical meanings of polysemantic modern legal terms. The author describes the results about the tendencies of semantic variation development and terminological unification, on the other hand.