habitants are united by the mutual responsibility of the kindred; for others they are under the authority of their reeve, who settles their petty disputes, collects their contributions to the national revenue, leads the effective men to the fyrd, and with his four companions represents the township in the court of the hundred or in the folkmoot. The townships are not always independent; sometimes they are the property of a lord, who is a noble follower, comes, gesith, thegn, of the king, with jurisdiction over the men of the township, and many of the rights which we associate with feudalism. Where, however, this is the case, the organisation is of the same sort; the reeve is the lord's nominee, the moot is the lord's court, the status of the inhabitants is scarcely less than free, and their duties to the state are as imperative as if they were free. A cluster of townships is the hundred or wapentake; its presiding officer is the hundred-man: he calls the hundredmoot together, and leads the men of the hundred to the host, or to the hue and cry, or to the shiremoot. He is generally elected, although sometimes the feudal element is all powerful here also, and he is nominated by the noble or prelate to whom the hundred belongs. He has no undivided authority; he is helped by a body of freemen, twelve or a multiple of twelve, who declare the report of the hundred, and are capable of declaring the law. Nearly all the work of judicature is contained in this, for questions of fact are determined by compurgation and ordeal. The shiremoot is a ready court of appeal, and the royal audience is accessible only when both hundredmoot and folkmoot have failed to do justice. A cluster of hundreds makes the shire; its officers are the ealdorman, the sheriff, and the bishop; its councillors are the thegns, who declare the report of the shire; its judges are the folk assembled in the shiremoot, the people, the lords of land with their stewards, and from the townships the reeve and four men and the parish priest. The shiremoot is the most complete organisation under the system it is the FOLKMOOT; not the witenagemot of the shire, but the assembly of the people; in it all freemen in person or by representation appear. Its ealdorman is appointed by the witan of the whole nation, like the princeps of Tacitus; its reeve once, perhaps, elected from below and authorised from above, like the king or bishop himself. The ealdorman leads the whole shire to the host, the sheriff commands the freemen, the lords their comites and vassals, the bishop's reeve or abbot's reeve the tenants of the churches; all under the ealdorman as the national leader. The ealdorman and bishop attend the witenagemot; the sheriff executes justice and secures the rights of the king or nation in the shire. The union of shires is the kingdom; whether there be two or three as in any of the seven kingdoms, or all together in the kingdom of Athelstan or Edgar. But the kingdom is merely an aggregation of shires, which in many cases have themselves been kingdoms of earlier formation, with the minimum of necessary administration. The king is at the head: the national council is the witenagemot. Under the Heptarchic arrangement there was no organised unity but the ecclesiastical. The Church in this aspect is older than the State. The Church councils were the only national councils, the metropolitan the only person whose word had the same force everywhere: it was through the Church that the nation first learned to realise its unity. Yet the unity of the race, though not available for organised government, was not forgotten. There was no period within historic times when one of the seven kingdoms had not an honorary and more or less real precedence. Whether or no this precedence was expressed by the title of Bretwalda, it involved no inherent authority, nor does it imply any unity of administration. Each kingdom has its own witenagemot, and the deliberations of the kings are rather consultations of plenipotentiaries than national councils. Only when Wessex has finally annexed the other kingdoms, is the nation counselled for by one witenagemot. Neither in its earlier nor in its later form, neither in the seven nor in the one, is the witenagemot formed on the model of the lower courts. It is not a folkmoot; although it repre sents the people, it is not a collection of representatives: its members are the principes, the sapientes, the comites and counsellors of royalty, the bishops, the ealdormen, and the king's thegns. The witenagemot can never have been a large assembly; seventeen bishops, a variable number of ealdormen, according as the shires were distributed singly or in clusters, never perhaps more than twenty; of vassal members also a variable number, gradually increasing as the power of the crown became greater and the number of jurisdictions multiplied. under the leaven of feudalism. The process of time and change of circumstances have now reversed the dictum of Tacitus. On greater matters the princes consult, on smaller matters all; the plebs, the folk, rises no higher than the shiremoot. But the whole claims of the people as against the king are vested in the witenagemot, and as the character of the king varies, those claims are more or less actively exercised. The witan, where they are able, have the right of electing and deposing kings; in conjunction with the king, of nominating ealdormen and bishops, of regulating the transfer of public lands, of imposing taxes, of voting supplies and so deciding war and peace, of authorising the enforcement of ecclesiastical decrees, of joining in the making of laws, of sitting as a high court of justice over all persons and causes. But under a strong king many of these claims are futile; the whole public land seems, by the eleventh century, to have been regarded as at the king's disposal really if not in name: the sheriffs, ealdormen, and bishops are named by the king; if he be a pious one, the bishops are chosen by him with respect to the consent of the diocesan clergy; if he be a peremptory one, they are appointed by his determined will. But the powers of legislation and taxation are never lost, nor does the king execute judgment without a court which is in name, and in reality perhaps, a portion of the witenagemot. Neither taxation nor legislation is very onerous work the trinoda necessitas and the rents of the public lands supply for a long time all the necessary expenses of government. Ex traordinary taxation is imposed by the witenagemot, as the Danegeld or the shipgeld; a regular tax of two shillings on every hide of land furnishes a bribe to the Danes, or a contribution of a ship and its equipments is levied on the shires in due proportions, to enable the king to resist them. The laws are mostly concerned with minute adjustments and modifications of usages, the great body of the common law being yet transmitted orally or by custom, not reduced to writing until it is in danger of being forgotten. The fabric is crowned by the king; not the supreme lawgiver of Roman ideas, nor the fountain of justice, nor the irresponsible leader, nor the sole and supreme politician, nor the one primary landowner; but the head of the race, the chosen representative of its identity, the successful leader of its enterprises, the guardian of its peace, the president of its assemblies; created by it, and, although empowered with a higher sanction in crowning and anointing, answerable to his people. He is the national representative; the national officers are his officers; he leads the army of the nation as the ealdorman that of the shire; he is supreme judge, as the sheriff is in the shiremoot; in each capacity his power is limited by a council of free advisers; and he is bound by oaths to his people to govern well, to maintain religion, peace, and justice, they being bound to him in turn by a general oath of fidelity. It would be rash to affirm that the system thus characterised ever existed in integrity, much more so that it existed in anything like this integrity for the whole four centuries that preceded the Conquest. Yet that every single portion of it existed at some period during those centuries, and when it ceased to exist was superseded by some other arrangement of the same kind, is capable of proof. Varieties of practice may have prevailed in different ages and districts, as to the names of the inferior courts, as to the number and functions of the assessors of the shiremoot, as to the law of compurgation, wergild and ordeal, as to the responsibility of the kindred, the hundred or the township for the production of culprits; but the general machinery was permanent, and during the greater part of the time little affected by Frank, Roman, or Celtic laws or politics. From the end of the tenth century a change sets in which might ultimately by a slow and steady series of causes and consequences have produced something like continental feudalism. The great position taken by Edgar and Canute, to whom the princes of the other kingdoms of the island submitted as vassals, had the effect of centralising the government and increasing the power of the king. Early in the eleventh century he seems to have entered on the right of disposing of the public land without reference to the witan, and of calling up to his own court by writ suits which had not yet exhausted the powers of the lower tribunals. The number of royal vassals was thus greatly increased, and with it the power of royal and noble jurisdictions. Canute proceeded so far in the direction of imperial feudalism as to rearrange the kingdom under a very small number of great earls, who were strong enough in some cases to transmit their authority to their children, though not without new investiture, and who, had time been given for the system to work, would have no doubt developed the same sort of feudality as prevailed abroad. Already by subinfeudation or by commendation great portions of the land of the country were being held by a feudal tenure, and the alodial tenure which had once been universal, was becoming the privilege of a few great nobles too strong to be unseated, or a local usage in a class of landowners too humble to be dangerous. : The Norman Conquest in one aspect stopped this natural growth of feudalism in another, it may be said to have introduced the feudal system. Had this system been developed naturally, it would have doubtless become, as it did abroad, the framework of government. The Conqueror saw the evils of this exemplified in France. He, from the beginning of his reign, attempted to rule as the national sovereign, not as the feudal lord. The great confiscations resulting from the rebellions of the native earls threw, however, enormous territories into his hands, and these being distributed among his followers on the feudal conditions, constituted him at once the supreme landowner. To these |