СНАР.
II.

§ 20. The Change gradual.

had no such privilege, we may well believe, though there is no direct evidence on the point, coveted his advantages, and acquired from the king the rights and duties of the thegnhood. Even the simple freeholder discovered the weakness of his isolated condition, and commended himself and his land to a wealthy thegn, engaging to do him service and to be judged in his court, in return for support and protection.

Even up to the Norman conquest this change was still going on. To the end, indeed, the old constitutional forms were not broken down. The hundred mote was not abandoned, where freemen enough remained to fill it. Even where all the land of a hundred had passed under the protection of a lord there was little outward change. The tenants were summoned to hear causes under the presidency of the lord's officer, instead of being summoned under presidency of an officer appointed by themselves or by the king. But that was all. The shire mote too was still in existence. Even in war the obligation of all men to defend the country was still enforced, though it pressed with a special force upon the king's thegns. There was thus no actual breach of continuity in the nation. The thegnhood pushed its roots down, as it were, amongst the free classes. Nevertheless there was a danger of such a breach of continuity coming about. The freeman entered more and more largely into a condition of dependence, and there was a great risk lest such a condition of dependence should become a condition of servitude. Here and there, by some extraordinary stroke of luck, a freeman might rise to be a thegn. But the condition of the class to which he belonged was deteriorating every day. The downward progress to serfdom was too easy to take, and by large masses of the population it was already taken. Below the increasing

CHAP.

II.

nagemot.

numbers of the serfs was to be found the lower class of slaves, who were actually the property of their masters. The Witenagemot was in reality a select body of $21. The King and thegns, if the bishops, who held their lands in much the Witethe same way, be regarded as thegns. It was rather an inchoate House of Lords, than an inchoate Parliament, after our modern ideas. It was natural that a body of men which united a great part of the wealth with almost all the influence in the kingdom should be possessed of high constitutional powers. The Witenagemot elected the king, though as yet they always chose him out of the royal family, which was held to have sprung from the god Woden. There were even cases in which they deposed unworthy kings. Their consent was necessary to make peace, to declare war, or to make a grant of fólkland. No act of public importance was valid without their conNo ealdorman was appointed, no bishop placed in his see, without their voice being heard in the matter. It would thus be easy to argue from one set of facts that the king was almost a cypher, just as from another set of facts it would be easy to argue that he was almost absolute. In truth, he was neither absolute nor a cypher. Kings like Alfred and his descendants had done pretty much as they wished, because they wished nothing which would be opposed to the wishes of the thegns. The more wealthy a man was, the more desirous he would be that his land might remain his own, instead of becoming the property of a sea-roving Dane. At home, as long as the king was a man of ability and character, there was no opposition of interests as yet between the king and his thegns. He himself was but as a thegn on his

sent.

own estates.

He too had tenants and serfs whose

ancestors had once been freemen on his lands.

As in the shiremoot the ealdorman and the bishop sat side by side, so sat Archbishop Dunstan by the side

CHAP.
II.

stan's eccle

siastical Policy.

of Edgar. After the legends which have obscured his fame are swept away, we descry, though dimly, the form §22. Dun- of a great statesman. The Danish wars had swept away the culture which had sent forth missionaries to the continent in earlier days, and which Alfred had striven hard to revive. Dunstan's life-long work was the work of an educationalist. He strove to bring back to England the knowledge and culture in which it was now outstript by the continent. He sought the moral training of his countrymen as well as their intellectual advancement. It was inevitable that in so doing he should throw in his lot with the monks. The conditions which enable a married clergy to hold up an example of life to their parishioners did not then exist. There was no open-eyed public opinion around the parish priest, no widely spread publicity calling for watchfulness against the temptation of turning the means which were intended to enable him to instruct others into property for the sustenance of his own family. Family cares devoured him, and it was well if, living as other men did, he did not become partaker in their sins. It would have been no wonder if Dunstan, like Hildebrand and Damiani after him, had sought to confront the evil by the drastic remedy of the proclamation of universal clerical celibacy. It is the mark of his greatness that he did nothing of the kind. He did not indeed resist two bishops who drove out the secular clergy from certain specified ecclesiastical houses in the dioceses of Winchester and Worcester. But he did not imitate them himself, and, as far as we know, he gave no encouragement to those who wished to do so. The monk, he believed, being bound to a celibate life, could give himself to his spiritual and educational mission as the married priest could not. But he steadily refused to use compulsion in favour of that which he regarded as the better life. He preferred working by example.

The secular laws of Edgar bear the stamp of Dunstan's mind. In them, an assumption of such a guardianship over the poor and oppressed as befits a king, is combined with an acquiescence in those existing conditions of the national life which made the exercise of that guardianship so difficult. The great division of the population into Danes and Englishmen stands revealed. Edgar can venture, with the consent of his witan, to amend the laws for the behoof of Englishmen. The Danes must be left to such laws as they please to choose for themselves. The spectacle which the reign presents is that of a king aiming at a higher life for his people, but conscious of the want of support. The king is more national than the thegns, and the thegns are more national than the people. The thegns would be ready to gather into groups, East Anglian, Northumbrian, Mercian, or West Saxon. Danes and English were especially ready to fly apart. In the lower classes there was still less cohesion. A strong king might draw the band a little more closely, if he tried to do no more. A weak king with unwise remissness and unwise violence would bring chaos back again.

Ethelred

and Ed

With Ethelred, chaos came again indeed. A fresh § 24. invasion of the Northern Danes found local resistance but no general resistance. The local ealdorman, an mund. Ulfkytel or a Brihtnoth, might lead the men of his shire to battle. But the king who, like Ethelred, was content to bribe off the invader made all national resistance impossible. He alone was the band by which the sticks of the faggot were united for resistance. When he contented himself with inaction, each stick was separately overpowered. The Witenagemot had in theory the power of deposing kings. But it had not the will to exercise it. Each man had his own interests and intrigues to attend to. At last, after Ethelred's death came a bright

CHAP.
II.

§ 25. Cnut's Reign.

$26. Edward the

moment under the hero Edmund. With his death all hope of resistance died away, and England without further struggle sank under the sway of Cnut.

Cnut's rule was not as terrible as might have been feared. He was perfectly unscrupulous in striking down the treacherous and mischievous chieftains who had made a trade of Ethelred's weakness and the country's divisions. But he was wise and strong enough to rule, not by increasing but by allaying those divisions. Resting his power upon his Scandinavian kingdoms beyond the sea, upon his Danish countrymen in England and his Danish huscarles, or specially trained soldiers in his service, he was able without even the appearance of weakness to do what in him lay to bind Dane and Englishman together as common instruments of his power. Fidelity counted more with him than birth. To bring England itself into unity was beyond his power. The device which he hit upon was operative only in hands as strong as his own. There were to be four great earls, deriving their name from the Danish word jarl, centralising the forces of government in Wessex, in Mercia, in East Anglia, and in Northumberland. With Cnut the four were officials of the highest class. They were there because he placed them there. They would cease to be there if he so willed it. But it could hardly be that it would always be so. Some day or another, unless a great catastrophe swept away Cnut and his creation, the earldoms would pass into territorial sovereignties, and the divisions of England would be made evident openly.

After the brief and inglorious reigns of the sons of Confessor. Cnut, the English crown was once more won by a king of the old West Saxon line. Edward the Confessor was less English in his character than any of his subjects. His mother Emma was the sister and daughter of