to a single chief. Naturally, therefore, it was the chief, the ealdorman, who gained most by the changes wrought by war. Everywhere he took the higher title of king, and in taking its title he gained a higher standing-point. He was the bond of union between many tribes. The ealdorman who now presided in the tribal assembly, derived his authority from him, even if he owed his position to an older tribal authority. At the end of the sixth century some ten or twelve kingdoms existed, and the authority of the kings would doubtless tend to increase in civil matters as they grew more successful as leaders in war. CHAP. II. 5. The the Witan. Yet growing as it was, the king's authority was by no means absolute. The power which the king wielded King and could only be exercised in accordance with the wishes of the armed force, and that armed force was still in great measure composed of the contingents of the freemen of the several tribes. It is true that it was not so altogether. By an old German custom, a great man had been accustomed to entertain a body of followersgesiths as they were called in England-who attached themselves not to the tribe, but to the person of him whom they followed and upon whose bounty they lived. For him they fought, and for him they were ready to die. They held it disgraceful to forsake him in battle, or even to leave the field alive if he were lying dead upon it. No doubt, if we possessed a history of those times, we should find that these two component parts of the king's army were also component parts of his council, and the Witan or wise men, without whose advice he did not venture to act in any important manner, were some of them the chief men of his personal following; some of them leading eorls, or landowners from the various populations which were blended together under his rule. But, however this council may have been formed, it had no CHAP. II. § 6. Administration of Justice. Its immediate organic connection with the people. members were not elected from beneath. They became councillors, either from their own position in life, or as selected by the king. As long as there was a powerful enemy in the field, this breach in the continuity of the constitution might not be felt. But it was none the less a source of danger. The judicial arrangements of our ancestors were those of a strong-handed but law-loving race, in which each man was ready to do himself right with his own hand, but in which there was a general understanding that feuds should not be perpetual. The notion that it was the duty of the state to punish crime, and the notion that the criminal himself was any the worse for the crime which he had committed, would have been alike unintelligible to them. All that they saw was that it was in their power to enforce upon the kindred of a murdered man, or upon him who had suffered loss of property, the acceptance of a weregild, or money payment, in satisfaction of the injury done to them, which they might otherwise have avenged by the slaughter of the aggressor. As again the power of taking vengeance was different in different ranks, as the relations of a murdered king were more likely to take effectual vengeance than the relations of an eorl or a simple ceorl, and as they therefore required more to induce them to draw back, a larger money payment was enforced in proportion to the rank of the person injured. As too the state had no interest in the matter excepting to prevent continual private warfare, it had no trained police to seize the criminal, and no trained advocates and judges to investigate evidence. It looked to the kindred of the accused person to present him before the popular assembly at which he was to be tried, or to pay his weregild in his stead. If he denied his guilt, he had to bring others to swear that he was innocent, and the declaration of the belief of these compurgators in his favour was accepted as satisfactory. If he failed to find compurgators, he had still the resource of appealing to the ordeal, doubtless performed in heathen times in some specially sacred spot. The assembled people who acted as his judges contented themselves with seeing that the provisions of ancient customs were duly carried out. CHAP. Needs of In proportion as the kingdoms increased in size, the $7. Moral moral defects of such a system must have been increas- the Popuingly felt. The special tie which bound the gesith to lation. his patron summoned into existence feelings of personal honour and loyalty, which were stronger, but at the same time narrower than the patriotic sentiment which bound the freeman to the community of his fellow tribesmen. The authority of the king was further off from him than the authority of the ealdorman had been. It is true that he had still a part in the action of the state, was still liable to be called out for service in the field, and that he and his fellows might be present on important occasions at the meetings of the king and his Witan, and might be allowed to applaud with their shouts the decisions taken in higher quarters. But even if the effect of the change be left out of account, it is evident that the moral needs of the Englishman of the sixth century, were precisely opposite to those of the Roman provincial of the fourth. In the empire where all individuality was crushed out by an enlightened but overwhelming despotism, the side of Christianity which was most acceptable was its anchorage in individual faith and energy. In the Teuton, within or without the old limits of the empire, individual vigour was the prominent characteristic. Organisation of bodies of men did not go very far. The needs of extensive warfare might do something, but its work was necessarily imperfect. If СНАР. § 8. The Christian Missionaries in England. the Teutonic settlers came to have an ideal at all, it was certain that it would be to them, as ideals are to all men, the complement of their existing acquirements. They required some view of life, which would at the same timesatisfy their inarticulate needs for a higher organisation, which would tame the wild strivings of passion in the individual man, and would teach the fierce red-handed slaughterer that self-denial and self-restraint were the highest virtues of human existence. The history of the middle ages in England, as on the Continent, is the history of successive generations accepting in church and state institutions which serve to repress or tame the wild exuberance of individual violence and passion. The middle ages start from diversity and aim at unity. Their art, their literature, their temporal and ecclesiastical legislation bear this impress distinctly. In another The law and swords of its When Augustine and his fellow missionaries landed in Kent in 597, they began this work of moral order. In one sense their arrival was the first step in the undoing of the isolation from Roman ideas, in which England had been standing for a century and a half. sense they brought something quite new. order of the empire had reposed on the legions. It had asked no assent from those upon whom it had imposed its will. The law and order of the Christian missionary rested on persuasion alone. He asked but for voluntary obedience, for that obedience which strengthens instead of weakening the sense of personality in the individual who accepts it. The old unity had crushed out individuality. The new unity would grow out of it, would found itself upon individual conscience, and harmonise individual energies for higher ends. In the midst of the troubles which preceded and succeeded the fall of the empire in the West, Christianity had advanced in two special directions. It was more monastic, and it was better organised, in the sixth century than it had been in the fourth. Against the faults of monasticism it is especially easy to declaim. A system which takes men out of the world and forbids them to exercise the ordinary duties of men amongst men, which acts in defiance of the strongest tendencies of human nature, instead of reducing them under discipline, and which in consequence erects a whole system of artificial duties and artificial faults, can never be regarded as a satisfactory solution of the problems which that nature presents. Nevertheless, it is impossible that a system so widely adopted, and so constantly recurred to, should have been wanting in elements fitting it at least for a time to render the highest services to mankind. The apologies which some are inclined to make for it may be dismissed as irrelevant. If we can only praise the monks because they improved cultivation, or even because they were benevolent to the poor, it is better not to praise them at all. These things are but the accidents of monasticism. Its essence was a selfish unselfishness. It aimed at sacrificing the excitement and vain-glory of the struggles and triumphs of the present, sometimes it may be, at escaping from the depressing defeats and miseries of life, in order to gain eternal peace in the world to come, with some firstfruits of quiet and rest in the world which was. Yet self-centred as were the thoughts of the monk, his selfseeking was of incomparably a higher order than that of the world around. Other men might provide for themselves by grasping avarice, by hasty passionate violence, by giving free rein to their most debasing passions. The monk would keep the wild animalism of his nature firmly down; and, as always happens, the effort to rise higher in one direction brought with it the power of rising |