A contemporary document known as The Ordinance concerning the Dunsæte has survived recording an agreed procedure for dealing with disputes between the English and the Welsh, which appears to confirm that the Wye was the border. It would seem to date from the tenth century and expressly refers to the border between the two peoples as a river. This has generally, although not universally, been taken to mean the River Wye in Herefordshire. We cannot be absolutely sure of this because the Ordinance does not expressly refer to Hereford or the Magonsæte and nor does it give the name of the river itself. It is also worth observing that although the Ordinance is accepted as authentic; the problem of fabricated Anglo-Saxon documents remains. Identifying such forgeries is not an exact science, academic views change, and what is accepted as genuine in one generation may not be in the next. The Ordinance is undoubtedly an unusual document but there is no reason why it should not be taken seriously as long as it is recognised that there is no complete assurance that it does relate to the Wye. It would therefore be unwise to construct an entire theory of English-Welsh relationships based on this one piece of evidence alone.

The primary aim of the Ordinance is to deal with the theft of property by one people from the other and in this it is consistent with Anglo-Saxon law codes generally. It starts by dealing with the theft of cattle, presumably because this was the most common kind of stock and therefore the most common kind of theft. The Ordinance effectively operates by imposing collective responsibilities on the English and Welsh. Where the owner of stolen cattle finds that their track leads to the river the tracking of the stolen cattle then becomes the responsibility of the owner of the land on the other side of the river. Accordingly if the owner of the land fails to retrieve the cattle then he becomes liable to pay compensation to the rightful owner. A period of nine days is allowed for the search.

In parts the meaning of the Ordinance is obscure and difficult to follow clearly, but it does include a list of things which might be stolen, together with the value to be attached to each for the purposes of compensation.

One item in this list to which the eye is immediately drawn is the value, one pound, allotted to a man. It has been assumed that this must be a reference to the value of a stolen slave. Given that the worth of a slave was also set at the same level in both the laws of Athelstan and in an agreement made between Aethelred II and the Danes it does seem likely that the Ordinance is alluding to slaves in this respect. In his study of slavery in early medieval England, Pelteret points out that there are numerous provisions dealing with the problem of the theft of slaves in Anglo-Saxon law-codes these references being supplemented by other documentary records. According to the Domesday survey more than 18% of the population of Herefordshire in the mid-eleventh century were classified as slaves and whilst it is certainly possible that this figure may have been a little lower in the ninth century it is likely that slaves still formed a substantial minority of people at that time.

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