It was rather an aggregation of many kingships into one. CHAP. II. $15. The Danish Such a union was a frail one. It would probably have broken down as the less successful efforts of the Northum- Wars. brian kings in the same direction had broken down before, but for the new flood of invasion which poured over England. As fierce as the ancestors of Englishmen themselves had been four centuries before, the Danish pirates had begun, even before Egbert's time, to harry the coasts of England. In the time of one of Egbert's sons they took up permanent quarters in England. The north and centre of the land fell easily into their hands. At the beginning of the reign of Alfred, the youngest and greatest of Egbert's grandsons, it seemed as if the whole would come permanently under their dominion. At last in 878, after an heroic struggle, he succeeded in imposing upon the invaders the Treaty of Wedmore, which saved from their grasp the country south of the Thames together with that part of Mercia which lay to the south-west of the Watling Street. For the rest their kings gave a vague acknowledgment of Alfred's over-lordship, an acknowledgment which he was in no position to interpret strictly. To the north of the line of partition the Danes settled at will. The Danish termination -by in such names as Derby and Ashby, Grimsby and Whitby, still marks the place of their settlements on the map of England. § 16. The Struggle of the West To Alfred and his house the half was more than the whole. In the struggle which his descendants, the West Saxon Kings carried on against the Danes they had Saxon. what Egbert had not had, a national sentiment at their back. Gradually the frontier was pushed farther north. Kings with the Danes. СНАР. II. $17. Growth of Kingly Authority. Before Alfred's son Edward died, the whole of Mercia was incorporated with his immediate dominions. The way in which the thing was done was more remarkable than the thing itself. Like the Romans, he made the fortified towns the means of upholding his power. But unlike the Romans, he did not garrison them with colonists from amongst his own immediate dependents. He filled them, as Henry the Fowler did afterwards in Saxony, with free townsmen, whose hearts were at one with their fellow countrymen around. Before he died in 924, the Danish chiefs in the land beyond the Humber had acknowledged his over-lordship, and even the Celts of Wales and Scotland had given in their submission in some form which they were not likely to interpret too strictly. His son and his two grandsons, Athelstan, Edmund, and Edred completed the work, and when after the short and troubled interval of Edwy's rule in Wessex, Edgar united the undivided realm under his sway in 958, he had no internal enemies to suppress. He allowed the Celtic Scottish King who had succeeded to the inheritance of the Pictish race to possess the old Northumbrian land north of the Tweed, where they and their descendants learned the habits and speech of Englishmen. But he treated him and the other Celtic kings distinctly as his inferiors, though it was perhaps well for him that he did not attempt to impose upon them any very tangible tokens of his supremacy. The story of his being rowed by eight kings on the Dee is doubtless only a legend by which the peaceful king was glorified in the troubled times which followed. Such a struggle, so successfully conducted, could not fail to be accompanied by a vast increase of that kingly authority which had been on the growth from the time of its first establishment. The hereditary ealdormen, the representatives of the old kingly houses, had passed away. The old tribes, or-where their limitations had been obliterated by the tide of Danish conquest, as was the case in central and northern England-the new artificial divisions which had taken their place, were now known as shires, and the very name testified that they were regarded only as parts of a greater whole. The shire mote still continued the tradition of the old popular assemblies. At its head as presidents of its deliberations were the ealdorman and the bishop, each of them owing their appointment to the king, and it was summoned by the shire-reeve or sheriff, himself even more directly an officer of the king, whose business it was to see that all the royal dues were paid within the shire. In the more general concerns of the kingdom, the king consulted with his Witan, whose meetings were called the Witenagemot, a body which, at least for all ordinary purposes, was composed not of any representatives of the shire-motes, but of his own dependents, the ealdormen, the bishops, and a certain number of thegns whose name, meaning 'servants,' implied at least at first, that they either were or had at one time been in some way in the employment of the king. CHAP. II. Growth of a Military Aristo cracy. Such a change looks, as long as we attend only to § 18. words and forms, as if the kingship were acquiring something like absolute power. No conclusion could be more delusive. Absolute power is gained by kings who put themselves at the head of a popular movement against an oppressive aristocracy, at a time when the people are not prepared to combine in order to carry out under their own inspection the reforms which they need. Under such circumstances, a successful king, like the early Emperors, can do very much as he pleases to individuals. Nothing of the kind is to be found in our early English history. What the English freeman wanted was not to be avenged upon his richer CHAP. $19. The Eorls superseded by the Thegns. neighbour, but to be protected, without the burden of constantly being called out for military service in the most distant quarters. The view of life taken by an ordinary landowner was very limited. His politics were but the politics of his hundred, or at the most they extended only to his shire. The great English kingdom scarcely appealed at all to his imagination, and it was a real hardship if the man of Hampshire was asked to leave his fields to repel a Danish incursion on the coast of Norfolk, or to establish the supremacy of the national king over the Danish chieftains of Northumberland. The necessities of war therefore combined with the sluggishness of the mass of the population to favour the growth of a military force, which would leave the tillers of the soil to their own peaceful occupations. As the conditions which make a standing army possible on a large scale did not yet exist, such a force must be afforded by a special class, and that class must be composed of those who either had too much land to till themselves, or, having no land at all, were released from the bonds which tied the cultivator to the soil, in other words, it must be composed of a landed aristocracy and its dependents. In working out this change, England was only aiming at the results which similar conditions were producing on the Continent. But just as the homogeneousness of the population drew even the foreign element of the Church into harmony with the established institutions, so it was with the military aristocracy. It grouped itself round the king, and it supplemented, instead of overthrowing, the old popular assemblies. Two classes of men, the eorls and the gesiths, had been marked out from their fellows at the time of the conquest. The thegn of Edgar's day differed from both, but he had some of the distinguishing marks of either. He was not like the gesith, a mere personal follower of the king. He did not, like the eorl, owe his position to his birth. Yet his relation to the king was a close one, and he had a hold upon the land as firm as that of the older eorl. He may, perhaps, best be described as a gesith who had acquired the position of an eorl without entirely throwing off his own characteristics. Of the details of the change which took place we can only speak with hesitation. The period which separated the reign of Edgar from the Teutonic conquest was five hundred years, a period as long as that which separates the reign of Victoria from the reign of Edward III. Of this period our notices are scanty. But there can be little doubt that the change began in the practice of granting special estates in the folkland, or common undivided land, to special persons. At first this land was doubtless held to be the property of the tribe, and only granted away by the king with the consent of the tribe. When the king rose above the tribes, he granted it himself with the consent of his Witan. A large portion was granted to churches and monasteries. But a large portion went in private estates, or book land, as it was called, from the book or charter which conveyed them to the king's own gesiths, or to members of his own family. The gesith thus ceased to be a mere member of the king's military household. He became a landowner as well, with special duties to perform to the king, but nevertheless with the feeling of independence which the possession of land is apt to give. His example too told on others. If he strengthened the king's hands, his relation to the king gave him strength. He had special jurisdiction given him over his tenants and serfs, exempting him and them from the authority of the hundred mote, though they still remained, except in very exceptional cases, under the authority of the shire mote. Eorls who D СНАР. |