We have now nearly reached the end of the seventh century of our era, and we may well take note of the fact that it was, not for England only, a century of great religious change. The world-famous Hegira of Mohammed happened in 622, when Edwin was reigning in Deira. Throughout the reigns of the great kings at Bamburgh the invincible armies of Islam were sweeping over Syria and Egypt, overthrowing the ancient kingdom of Persia and for seven long years laying siege, all-but successful siege, to Constantinople. It may be well for us children of the Saxon to be reminded that our profession of Christianity is not older than the Mussulman’s allegiance to the faith of the Prophet. Our ancestors were idolators at the same time as the ancestors of our Mohammedan fellow-subjects in the east; the same century saw both our own forefathers and theirs converted from polytheism to monotheism, from chaotic Nature-worships to “the religion of a book”.

A very noticeable figure in the south of England at the close of this century was Cadwalla, King of the West Saxons. The kingdom of Wessex had fallen after the death of Cenwalh in 672 into dire confusion and disorder. Cadwalla, who was descended in the fourth generation from the great fighter Ceawlin, was one of the many claimants for the throne. His first victories, however, were not won over any rival competitors for the West Saxon crown, but over his South Saxon neighbours. Between Wessex and Sussex there seems to have existed in these early centuries an enduring blood-feud. The enmity was not likely to be lessened by remembrance of the fact, already mentioned, that in 661 Wulfhere, King of Mercia, had wrested the Isle of Wight and part of Hampshire from the West Saxons and handed them over to his convert and godson, Ethelwalh of Sussex. Against Sussex, therefore, Cadwalla, “that most strenuous young man of the royal race of the Gewissas,” while still an exile, about 685, directed the arms of the followers whom he had gathered round him in the forests of Chiltern. He was at first successful, slaying King Ethelwalh and laying waste the land of Sussex with cruel and depopulating slaughter, but was repulsed by two ealdormen who acted as regents after the death of the king. Just at this time, however, Cadwalla seems to have made good his claim to the crown of Wessex, and with the forces of the whole West Saxon kingdom now at his back, he set himself to recover the lost provinces of Wight and the Meonwaras, and at the same time to extirpate the idolatry which still lingered in that conservative Jutish population. Herein he seems to have been abetted by the zealous Wilfrid, who notwithstanding his friendship for Ethelwalh was willing to work for the good of the Church with Ethelwalh’s destroyer, and who received from him as the reward of his co-operation one fourth of the 1,200 hides into which the Isle of Wight was divided.

King Cadwalla, though an apostle of Christianity, reflected, of course, some of the barbarism of his age. There were two lads of royal blood (brothers of the last king of Wight) who had escaped to the mainland, but whose hiding-place was unfortunately discovered. Cadwalla, who had been wounded in the wars and was resting for a time at a house not far distant, ordered that the youths should be slain; but a certain Cyniberct, abbot of the monastery of Redbridge, came to Cadwalla’s bedside and made earnest intercession, not for the lives of the hapless lads, but that before their execution “they might be imbued with the sacraments of the Christian faith”. The request was granted. The two young princes were converted and baptised, and when the executioner made his appearance “they joyfully submitted to the temporal death by which they doubted not that they should pass over into the everlasting life of the soul”.

The war of Wessex with Sussex continued and soon brought in Kent also, which came to the help of its southern neighbour. After two years’ ravaging of Kent, the king’s brother Mul, by some sudden turn of fortune, fell into the hands of the men of that land (687), and they in their rage and exasperation burned him and twelve of his followers alive, a savage deed, which was like to have made a truceless war between the West Saxons and the men of Kent. Strange to say, however, this work of revenge was not long engaged in by the brother of the victim. In the year 688, after little more than two years of bloody reign, Cadwalla, stricken with satiety or remorse, went on pilgrimage to Rome. He had two great desires: “to be baptised at the threshold of the apostles and to be speedily freed from the flesh that he might pass into eternal joy”. Both desires were granted. The devout Syrian Pope, Sergius I., baptised him by the name of Peter on April 10, 689, and on the 20th, while yet wearing the white robes of a catechumen, he died of Roman fever. He was buried in the great church of St. Peter, and a Latin epitaph in twelve elegiacs was carved over his tomb. The meteoric career of “the most strenuous Cadwalla” who reigns and ravages for two years and a half, and at thirty dies “in Christ’s garments” at Rome, and is buried at St. Peter’s, forms one of the strangest pages in Anglo-Saxon history.

Cadwalla’s successor, a remote kinsman named Ine, descended from Cerdic, but not from Ceawlin, reigned for thirty-seven years (688–726) over the West Saxons. In the sixth year of his kingship the blood-feud with Kent was ended by a treaty under which the men of Kent bound themselves to pay 30,000 coins of some kind (the denomination is not clearly stated) for the murder of Mul. The West Saxon king seems to have had but little difficulty in holding down Sussex, which before the end of the eighth century altogether disappears from the list of the kingdoms. He probably established some sort of protectorate over Essex, since (apparently about 693) he calls Erconwald, Bishop of London, “my bishop”. In 715 he fought with Ceolred, King of Mercia, at Wodensburh.82 As the result of the battle is not stated we may, perhaps, infer that the victory was doubtful. The chief operations of the West Saxon king seem, however, to have been on his Western borders which were notably extended by him. In 710 he and his kinsman Nun, king of the South Saxons, fought against Geraint, king of the West Welshmen, and it was probably to mark and to secure the increase of territory thus won that Ine built the fortress of Taunton in the valley of the Tone.

On the other hand there were, as so often happened in the disorganised West Saxon house, troubles with the king’s own kinsfolk. In 721 it is said “Ine slew Cynewulf the Etheling”. In the next year, Ine’s own queen, Ethelburga, appears as the demolisher of the newly raised fortress of Taunton. Apparently, however, she was warring for, not against her husband, and we may, perhaps, safely connect this entry with those which immediately follow it: “Ealdbert went into banishment into Surrey and Sussex, and Ine fought with the South Saxons,” and (725) “Ine fought with the South Saxons and there slew Ealdbert the Etheling whom he had before expelled from his kingdom”. If we are not erroneously combining these scanty notices, Ealdbert an Etheling of the royal house rebelled against his kinsman, seized the new fort of Taunton, was besieged therein by the martial consort of Ine, and on the storming of that stronghold fled into Sussex, where, three years after, he was defeated and slain by the West Saxon king.

In 726, sated apparently with rule and strife and victory, the elderly Ine followed the example of his predecessor, resigned the crown to a kinsman—apparently a remote kinsman—named Ethelheard, and performed the great pilgrimage to Rome, “desiring in this life to wander round the neighbourhood of the holy places, that he might win a kinder reception from the holy ones in heaven”. According to William of Malmesbury83 the king’s wavering and procrastinating temper was definitely turned towards the Roman pilgrimage by the exhortations of his wife Ethelburga who acted the following parable in order to give weight to her words. It happened upon a day that the king and his court left a certain tun in which they had been dwelling with a profusion of regal luxury. By Ethelburga’s orders the steward filled the rooms of the royal abode with rubbish, allowed cattle to wander through it, defiling its floors, and placed a sow which had just littered, in the royal couch. Persuading the king, on some pretext or other, to go back to the tun, she turned his natural surprise at the hideous change into an argument for relinquishing the world. “Where, lord husband, are now the pomps and delights of yesterday? Like a river hastening to the sea is all the glory of man. As hath been the delight of our life here so shall be our torments hereafter.” With these words and with the sight of the squalid habitation, she persuaded him at once to perform the great renunciation for which she had so long vainly laboured. The death of Ine was apparently not so sudden or so dramatic as that of his predecessor, but there can be no doubt that he died in Rome and never returned to his native land.

The especial interest, for us, of the reign of Ine lies in the fact that he was the first King of Wessex who published written laws for the guidance of his subjects. Till his time such legislative activity as existed among our ancestors had been confined to the kingdom of Kent, where it had evidently been called into being by the organising and civilising influence of the Roman ecclesiastics. “These are the dooms which Ethelbert the king gave forth in Augustine’s days”: so runs the title of the document which now stands first in the collection of Anglo-Saxon laws. This document is little more than a schedule of the fines to be paid for various offences committed. Though later legislators are a little less dry and curt in their utterances, the general character of their work is not greatly different. As with most of the barbarian codes the repression of crime and the redress of injuries is their first care. They say little about rights, much about wrongs. The rules which guided the devolution of property, and the various customs which made up “folkright” were, no doubt, deeply engraved on the minds and hearts of the people, and it is not from any formal enactment of a royal legislator, only from casual allusions to them, that we have to learn their nature and their history.

After the death of Ethelbert, law-making activity seems to have slumbered for two generations. Then about the year 680, Hlothere and Eadric, who were apparently joint kings of Kent, put forth a small collection of “dooms” adding some items to Ethelbert’s list of offences and penalties. Eadric’s son, Wihtred, in the year 696, issued another set of laws, dealing more with offences against morality and religion—with adultery, Sabbath-breaking, the worship of devils, the eating of flesh in Lent, and so forth. The strong ecclesiastical influence under which Wihtred’s laws were framed is evidenced by the preface which is to this effect: “When Wihtred the most gracious king of Kent was ruling, in the fifth year of his reign (696), ... the 6th day of October, in the place which is called Berkhamstead, there was gathered together for counsel an assembly of great men. There was Berwald, archbishop of the Britons, also Gybmund, bishop of Rochester: and every rank of the churches of the land spake in concord with the obedient people. Then did the great men with the consent of all men ‘find’ these dooms and added them to the law-customs of Kent, as is hereafter said and spoken.”

The expressions used in this and many similar prefaces in the collection of Anglo-Saxon laws indicate that which is probably incapable of definition, the sort of share which the leading men of Church and State had in the royal legislation. Laws are passed in the name and by the authority of the king, but he is no uncontrolled autocrat, and for any important change in the “law-customs” of the people, the great men of the realm must share the responsibility.

We may now turn from the rather obscure and elliptical “dooms” of the Kentish kings to the much fuller and more interesting laws of Ine of Wessex which seem to have been promulgated about 693, a year or two before those of Wihtred. Like the latter they were framed “with the counsel and consent of my two bishops, Hedde of Winchester and Erconwald of London, and of all mine ealdormen and the oldest witan of my people and also of a great assembly of the servants of God”. “My father Cenred” is also named among the royal advisers, thereby raising a difficult question as to Ine’s accession to the throne while his father was still living. The preface ends, “And let no ealdorman nor any of our subjects after this seek to turn aside any of these our dooms”.

As it is impossible to give here anything like a complete digest of the Anglo-Saxon laws, we may leave unnoticed the ordinances for the repression of crime—especially the crime of theft—which constitute the larger part of the document before us, and may confine our attention to those paragraphs which deal with the tenure of land and with the ranks and orders in the West Saxon state.

In all the earlier stages of a nation’s life, before the people have begun to flock into great cities, there is no subject of more vital importance than the relation of the Folk to the Land. In the seventh century in England this was doubtless governed chiefly by old unwritten customs which needed not to be formally enunciated because they were universally understood. Two precious sentences, however, in Ine’s laws give us a glimpse of the agricultural life of that day, and, combined with information drawn from other sources, enable us in some measure to reconstruct the rural community as it then existed. “A ceorl’s homestead84 should be fenced in, winter and summer. If he be unfenced and his neighbour’s beast rush in by the opening which he has left, he shall receive nothing on account of [the damage done by] that beast, but must drive it out and bear the loss” (§ 40). “If ceorls have a common meadow85 or other divided land86 to fence, and some have fenced their portion, others not, and [stray beasts87] eat their common arable or pasture, then those who are responsible for the opening shall pay the others who have fenced their portion for the injury that is done and take such compensation as is due from the [owners of the intruding] cattle” (§ 42).

This law shows clearly that we are here in presence of an institution, the existence of which is proved by sentences of Tacitus, by charters of Anglo-Saxon kings, by manor-rolls of many succeeding generations down to the very last century, the so-called Open Field System. This system was not socialistic nor what we understand by the word communistic, and yet it may truly be described in terms drawn from the life of to-day as a system which formed “a community of shareholders”.88 Such a community was settled, by what means, peaceful or warlike, we need not inquire, on some land cleared, perhaps, from the forest where they founded what we should call a village, but what they called a tun or a ham,89 to which they gave the name of their own little tribe or kinship. The memory of the Yslings may have quite died out from suburban Islington, and Birmingham is no longer the little Mercian ham where once the Beormings clustered, but there seems no sufficient reason to doubt that from some such settlements as these sprang the numerous tons and hams which dot the map of England and have given their names to a stalwart progeny in America and at the Antipodes.90

In the village settlements thus formed, of course, the main business of the inhabitants was agriculture, and this appears to have been conducted mainly on the Three Field System in which the land that was not reserved for pasture was put one year under wheat sown in the winter, the next year under oats or barley sown in the spring, and the third year lay fallow. Now the peculiarity of the Open Field System is this, that instead of each owner having his own bit of land separate from the rest, in which he could practise this rotation of crops by himself, the community as a whole had three large districts undergoing that rotation, and in each of these districts the ceorl (as the Anglo-Saxon village shareholder was called) had a number of separate strips of land, as a rule not adjacent to one another, assigned to him, and in the cultivation of these strips he was probably for ever helping or being helped by the owners of the strips adjoining. The system appears to us inconceivably complicated and absurd: it can hardly be even understood without reference to a map91 in which we see the strips of varying width, but generally a furlong in length, lying side by side for a while, and then in another group starting off at right angles to their former direction, but always preserving this strip-like formation. Looking on such a map we can better understand what King Ine meant when he talked of the gedal-land or divided land which it was the duty of the ceorl owner to fence; since, obviously, if the end of his strip abutted on the forest or on the pasture in which the cows of the community were feeding, his carelessness in leaving it unfenced would work annoyance and loss to many others besides himself.

The causes and the origin of this remarkable system are lost in prehistoric darkness. It has been well said92 that “it is the more remarkable, because with all its inconveniences of communication, all its backwardness in regard to improvements, all its trammels on individual enterprise and thrift, all its awkward dependence of the individual on the behaviour of his neighbours, it repeats itself over and over again for centuries, not only over the whole of England but over a great part of Europe”. One thinks that some idea of future repartitions, some desire to prevent any one individual or family from getting too strong a grip of the land, must have been at work here as with the Germans in the first Christian century, of whom Tacitus wrote: “They change their fields year by year, and there is still land left over”.93 To continue the previous quotation: “the system was particularly adapted to the requirements of a community of shareholders who were closely joined together in the performance of their work, the assertion of their rights, the fulfilment of their duties and the payment of their dues”.

If we now inquire what was the extent of the land thus strangely divided which was generally owned in the seventh century by the Anglo-Saxon ceorl, we shall find that the determining factor is his ability to grapple with the necessary cultivation of the soil; or, in other words, the size of his estate is expressed in terms of his ploughing power. The normal English plough-team consisted of eight oxen yoked two and two together; and the land which it was possible to plough by such an ox-team was called in English a hide, in the Latin of the later lawyers a carucate.94 The extent of a hide was not always precisely the same even in the earliest times,95 and in later times there are puzzling differences in its dimensions, but as a rule it seems safe to estimate it at 120 acres.

If a husbandman had only two oxen (in which case he would generally have to rely on co-operation with his neighbours to get his land tilled) he could only hope to cultivate the fourth part of a hide. This was called a yard-land in Old English, or a virgate96 in legal Latin. An even smaller division was the ox-gang or bovate (the eighth of a hide), which belonged to the husbandman who had but one ox to contribute to the common ploughing.97

The question now arises, “What was the ordinary holding of the Anglo-Saxon ceorl during the first ages after his settlement in the land, and what was his social position?” The answer, of course, must be mainly conjectural, but especially when we consider the language of Bede, and his Anglo-Saxon translators, who use “family” as the equivalent of “hide,” it seems probable that the hide, whatever its dimensions may have been, was the normal holding of the ceorl in his day, and all the indications derived from the history of the seventh century seem to point to the conclusion that the ceorl was a free man, proprietor of the land which he cultivated, liable to service in the fyrd or national army, and to certain ecclesiastical payments, but in every other relation independent. Metaphors are dangerous things, but we may probably with safety characterise the numerous and sturdy class of ceorls as the backbone of the Anglo-Saxon community.

On the other hand, whatever the normal property of the ceorl might be, it is certain that in the course of time holdings would be split up and the size of proprietorships would vary. While some ceorls—as we shall see later on—might become owners of as many as five hides and thus “attain unto thegn-right,” many more would see their holdings dwindle into virgates and bovates; perhaps even98 the virgate or yard-land would become the typical holding of the descendant of the original ceorl-settlers. The owner of 15 acres or even of 30 acres in those days when “intensive” cultivation was unknown, would not be able to do much more than provide food for himself and his family, and in a rough, undemocratic age would be deemed a person of little account in comparison with the great thegn or the abbot of a wealthy monastery who sat in the king’s council and affixed his cross to the king’s charters. Thus we can easily understand how the status of some, by no means of all the ceorls might already towards the close of the seventh century be slowly changing from absolute independence into ill-defined subjection or payment of rent to some great neighbouring land-owner whom he was learning to call his hlaford, or lord.99

Owing to the peculiar mode of its division the arable land of the tun has attracted the largest share of our attention. It is not to be forgotten, however, that surrounding the three great open fields which at one time or another came under the plough, there was also a large meadow in which there was “common of pasture” for the cattle belonging to the members of the tun. Surrounding this, again, and disparting one tun or ham from its neighbour, there would generally be found a belt of forest-land, as to which we have some interesting utterances from the mouth of the West Saxon legislator. The great economic use of the forest, in addition to the provision of fuel, was its supply of “mast” for the swine, whose flesh was an important part of the food of the people. In the forty-fourth of Ine’s laws it is ordained that if any one cut down a tree under which thirty swine could take shelter he shall pay a fine of thirty shillings. In the twentieth law we are introduced to “a foreigner or other stranger”—probably in most cases a Welshman—pushing towards us through a trackless forest. “Comest thou peaceably?” is evidently the question that rises to the lips of the Saxon ceorl as he sees the figure in outlandish garb dimly moving through the trees. If the stranger would dispel suspicion he must either wind his horn or shout at frequent intervals; otherwise the West Saxon may assume that he is a thief and either slay him or capture and hold him to ransom. In the former alternative, however, he must at once make the matter known and swear that he took the dead man for a thief; otherwise he will be liable to judicial process at the hands of the dead man’s kinsmen. Again,100 if a man burns a single tree in a forest, and is afterwards convicted, he shall pay the full fine of sixty shillings, for “Fire,” says the law-giver, “is a thief,” a secret, furtive creature that may do much mischief. But if a man goes boldly into the forest and cuts down trees for his own use, he shall be fined thirty shillings for the first tree so felled and so on up to ninety shillings, but no more, however extensive may have been his depredations, for “The axe is a tell-tale”. He could not have wielded it so long in the forest without a ringing sound which should have arrested the attention of the forester.

Of course there was an exception to the general law of the mutability of holdings in the case of the house of the ceorl with the little bit of land surrounding it. This, which we should call a homestead, was called in Anglo-Saxon a weorthig, and the fortieth law (already quoted) warned the ceorl that this must be kept always well fenced winter and summer, and that if any gaps were left in the hedge surrounding it he would have no claim against a neighbour for any damage that might be done by that neighbour’s beast rushing in through the opening.

The whole of the labour on the land of a ceorl who had the normal holding of a hide would certainly not be performed by himself and his family. We have frequent references in the laws to a servile class, generally known as theows, but sometimes—chiefly in the laws of the Kentish kings—as esnes. We may conjecture that this class was originally formed for the most part out of vanquished Britons spared by their conquerors; probably also from among the descendants of yet earlier strata of population, enslaved by the Britons themselves. It was certainly recruited by the so-called wite-theows, men probably originally of the class of ceorls, who having committed some crime and being unable to pay the pecuniary penalty for their offence were condemned to penal servitude, and in such a case generally forfeited the freedom of their descendants as well as their own. Probably the larger number of theows were in bondage to land-owners of higher rank than the ceorl, but one of the laws of Ethelbert of Kent101 shows that at any rate the possession of a slave by a ceorl was not a thing altogether unknown. Our information as to this servile class is, however, very imperfect, and relates chiefly to the floggings to which they may be subjected for various offences.102

Though the position of the great body of the ceorls, if it has been rightly stated here, was that of partners in a free and independent agricultural community, it must be admitted, as previously said, that we have already in the laws of Ine traces of another, probably an increasing class of gafol gelders or rent-payers. Land in these cases was held by free men under a lord, to whom payments had to be made in kind whenever the lord visited the tenant. In Saxon Britain, as in Frankish Gaul, the king and his chief nobles lived on the produce of their estates, not by drawing half-yearly rents and converting them into money, to be spent in their own distant palaces, but by moving about from tun to tun, from vill to vill, and calling upon their tenants for supplies of food which were consumed upon the spot by themselves and their retainers, doubtless with much wassail and jollity. From an estate of ten hides the lord was entitled to claim ten vessels of honey, three hundred loaves, twelve ambers of Welsh ale, thirty ambers of clear ale, two full-grown oxen or ten rams, ten geese, twenty hens, ten cheeses, a full amber of butter, five salmon, twenty pounds weight of fodder, and a hundred eels.103

From the consideration of the middle and lower classes of Anglo-Saxon society we ascend to consider the rather difficult questions connected with the higher ranks of that society, the thegns, the eorls, the ealdormen, about whom the Laws and the Chronicles inform us. In this examination we should be left in almost hopeless darkness were it not for two institutions both well known in all the collections of primitive Teutonic law, and both very repugnant to our modern ideas of justice, wergild and (so-called) compurgation.

The essential principle of the wergild was compensation in money to the kindred of a murdered man, in order to induce them to abstain from righting or avenging themselves by force. Far back in the dimmest ages of the Teutonic foreworld the historical student discerns a period when all wrongs were avenged by the stroke of the broad-sword. The right, and more than the right, the sacred duty, of vengeance was handed on from father to son, and the circle widened from kinsman to kinsman, till the terrible blood-feud was like to destroy a tribe or even a nation. Then at some period far back in the ages, the idea was conceived of exorcising the spirit of revenge by the wand of pecuniary compensation. Let the relatives of a murdered man receive a wer, a payment in money, proportioned to his rank and position in the tribe, and, the family honour being thus satisfied, let them forego the right to revenge. If the injury were something less than death—if it were maiming, mutilation, the abduction of a wife, unprovoked words of insult—a proportionate payment in the nature of wer was made to the sufferer himself. The wer was purposely fixed high according to the value of money in those days, and if the offender were unable to pay it, he and sometimes his family with him became the bondslaves of the injured party. There was thus an element of prevention as well as of compensation in the punishment inflicted. But in all this we do not find any thought of punishment inflicted by the state to avenge the injured majesty of the law; nothing of that feeling which now makes the murder of the most degraded outcast a matter which must be inquired into with the utmost diligence by the police and punished by the hands of the executioner. This thought was indeed in some degree expressed by the wite or fine for murder, breach of the peace and so on, which was paid to the king or to one of his officers, but this fine was generally less in amount and always less in importance than the venerable wergild payable to the kindred.

The amount of wergild was elaborately proportioned to the station in society of the injured party—twice as high for the nobleman as for the squire, three times as high for the squire as for the yeoman (if one may be permitted to use as a very rough approximation the terms current in modern society); but it is important to remember that obligation in this system of law went hand in hand with privilege. If the wer for an injured thegn was high, it was on the level of that wer that he would have to atone to the king for offences committed by him against the law of the land.104 The wergild tariff, however, though frequently referred to, is not regularly set forth in the laws either of Ethelbert or of Ine, an omission common to it with many of the other Teutonic codes, especially that of the Lombards. Probably the amount of wer payable in each case was so well known through long usage that the legislator deemed it needless to set it forth anew, but it is possible also that there was a variable element left, in some cases, to be the subject of bargaining between the two kins of the injurer and the injured. Some broad lines of demarcation, however, may be clearly traced. We know that the ceorl was called a twy-hynd man, because the ordinary compensation for his violent death was 200 shillings. A Welshman, however, who owned that single hide of land which seems to have been the normal property of the well-to-do ceorl, was entitled to a wergild of only 120 shillings, but if he so prospered as to become the owner of five hides of English soil then his wergild rose to the proportionate amount of 600 shillings.

The class next above the ceorl, the class corresponding with the gentry of modern times, the large land-holders who do not happen to hold any official position at the king’s court, were in the ninth century spoken of as thegns; and that word may, for convenience, be used here, though it is perhaps doubtful whether it was yet used as the simple designation of a class. In the word thegn the thought of soldiership and of service to the king seem almost inseparably blended. In the poem of Beowulf thegns seems to be equivalent to warriors.; while in the charters of Anglo-Saxon kings the Latin equivalent of thegn is almost invariably minister. In the laws of Ine these men seem to be generally spoken of as gesithcund, men who by birth were entitled to be comrades and attendants of the king; and it is almost certain that they are identical with the twelf-hyndemen, their wergild being fixed at 1,200 shillings. Higher than this these laws do not enable us to go, but the tenor of later legislation supports the conjecture that the wergild for an ealdorman or for a bishop was 4,800 shillings, for an archbishop or etheling (member of the royal house), 9,000 shillings, and for the king himself, 18,000 shillings.105

It will be seen that the Ealdorman is here put on a level with the Bishop. At the point of West Saxon history which we have now reached, there seems to have been one ealdorman to every shire. He commanded the fyrd of his shire in battle, he presided along with the bishop and the reeve in the shire-gemot, of which later laws than Ine’s inform us: and altogether his position may perhaps be best imagined by comparing it with that of a modern lord-lieutenant of a county.

Some further light on the ranks and orders in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is shown by the rather copious ordinances on the subject of that judicial process which is generally called compurgation. This name is not technically correct, as it is of ecclesiastical origin and belongs to later times than those with which we are now dealing; but we have not yet naturalised “oath-helping” as the Germans have naturalised eid-hilfe, and the word ath-fultum, occasionally used in the Anglo-Saxon laws, has not yet attained the same degree of currency as wergild. With the word “compurgation,” therefore, we must for the present rest satisfied.

We first meet with this custom in the fourteenth law of King Ine, who says, “If any one be accused of brigandage he shall clear himself by 120 hides or pay accordingly”. We naturally inquire what is meant by “clearing oneself by 14,400 acres,” and we receive further light on the question when we come to law 19 which tells us that “a king’s retainer (geneat) if his wer is 1,200 shillings may swear for 60 hides if he be a communicant,” on which the later Latin translator adds the gloss, “for 60 hides, that is for six men”.

We now see more plainly the meaning of “swearing by 120 hides”. A man accused of such a grave crime against society as brigandage must, in order to prove his innocence, procure the attestation of at least two king’s tenants (each presumably holding sixty hides of land) or twelve land-owners (each owner of ten hides), and they must swear that they believe him innocent. This is “oath-helping” or “compurgation”. This swearing process is, as has been often pointed out, not in the least like our modern examination of sworn witnesses to fact, nor does it contain the promise of our modern trial by jury. It is much more akin to the privilege allowed to the defendant of “calling witnesses to character,” a privilege which, where the evidence is only circumstantial, often has an important influence on the verdict. It must be admitted that even with us the force of such evidence frequently depends in some measure on the social status of the witness-bearers, but we should shrink from making the bald statement that a man accused of murder must produce two persons paying income-tax on £10,000 a year, or twenty persons at £1,000 a year, to declare their belief in his innocence.

The amount of “swearing power,” if it may be so called, belonging to each class of men is not very clearly stated. From the passage quoted above, with its Latin gloss, one is inclined to suppose that the ordinary ceorl swore for ten hides. It has been recently argued106 that he swore only for five or perhaps six hides. There is, however, evidently something factitious in the ownership of land thus theoretically assigned to him. We may say, certainly, that the ordinary ceorl did not possess five, much less ten hides of land; nor were all thegns, who had probably the same swearing power as the king’s geneat, possessed of sixty hides, say 7,200 acres. We may therefore rather look upon the number of hides for which ceorl, thegn and king’s thegn were entitled to swear as a conventional mode of stating for the guidance of the judge, the weight that was to be attached to their testimony when they gave it on behalf of a man accused of crime. Perhaps also there was in this curious tariff of credibility an attempt to ascertain the extent to which the belief of the vicinage could be relied on in the prisoner’s behalf. The ordinary ceorl, cultivating perhaps only one hide, but mingling with a certain number of his fellow ceorls in the exercise of his daily toil, might vouch for the opinion of the owners of ten hides; while the king’s retainer, from his wider field of observation, could vouch for the belief of a district six times as large.

From a consideration of the laws of Ine and other nearly contemporary sources, we may, perhaps, safely arrive at the following general conclusions as to the nature of the social edifice in the eighth century. At the summit of that edifice we find, of course, the king. He is king as yet of only a few English shires, a monarch of far less importance than the Frankish kings before they sank into inefficiency, yet a much greater man than many who had borne the same title in preceding centuries. In the early history and charters of the Anglo-Saxons we are struck with the large number of persons who bear the title of cyning or rex. Edwin slays five kings when fighting against the Saxons. Four kings were reigning at the same time in Sussex, three in Essex. There were kings of the Hwiccas (Worcestershire and Warwickshire) and a separate kingdom of the Middle Angles and of Lindsey, all of which vanished leaving no trace in the so-called “Heptarchy” of later historians.107

All this, though partly accounted for by the tendency to treat the kingdom as a family estate and to divide it up at the king’s death among his surviving sons, shows also that there must have been a strong movement in the opposite direction, a tendency towards unity and consolidation to produce the three comparatively large and powerful kingdoms of Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, which are practically all that are of historic importance in the eighth century.

It may have been partly on account of the increasing majesty of the royal name that the nobility (if we may thus speak of the classes reaching from the throne down to the lowest stratum of thegn-hood) became, what perhaps they had not been originally, a class of ministri and milites, servants to the king in peace and in war. Writers on the early constitution of the Germanic states are accustomed to dwell on the distinction between the primeval “nobility by birth” and its successor, “nobility by service”. Without denying the probability that nobles of the first kind existed among the invaders of England, we must admit that in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as we know them it is the second species, “nobility by service,” in the king’s court with which we find ourselves chiefly brought in contact. When the king takes counsel with his witan it is with the archbishop and bishops, with the ealdormen, the king’s thegns and the “exalted councillors” (gethungenan witan) in their various degrees that he deliberates, with their concurrence that he makes laws for the welfare of the realm, and by their cross-made signatures that his charters granting land are attested. We do not appear to have any accurate information as to the time of meeting of the witan (witenagemot). Nor was the place of meeting by any means always the same even for each Saxon kingdom, though Winchester, Kingston, and in later times London, were frequent homes of the West Saxon witenagemot.

The functions of this great council of the wise men of the realm, the degree to which they shared or controlled the royal power in matters of legislation, of finance, of the defence of the country, are better learned by watching the course of national history than from any attempt to frame a definition of that which was essentially vague, fluctuating and incoherent. The relation between the witenagemot and the medieval parliaments of the Plantagenets must be felt to be only one of rather faint analogy. In some respects the contemporary ecclesiastical councils of Visigothic Spain, at any rate in their later phases, present a much closer correspondence of type. It certainly seems, from the language of the Chronicle, that the English witan, like those councils, had a powerful voice in the election of the king, though, unlike the Spanish councillors, the Wise Men of Wessex were, in their choice, for the greater part of the time confined to one royal line, the men “whose descent goeth unto Cerdic”.108

NOTE ON ANGLO-SAXON MONEY.

To understand properly the information about wergilds supplied to us by the Anglo-Saxon laws, we must devote a little attention to the Anglo-Saxon currency. Our ancestors a thousand years ago used for the most part the same pecuniary language that we use to-day. They generally spoke of pounds, shillings and pence; and the clerkly ecclesiastics who had to translate these words into Latin employed the Libra, Solidus and Denarius, which have given us the well-known symbols £ s. d. This translation, however, into the terms of Roman currency has done nothing but confuse our own monetary history. Libra as the translation of pound is unobjectionable, but solidus—the only coin of that name that obtained wide currency, the solidus aureus of Constantinople—was a gold coin of which 72 went to the pound of gold, and was in intrinsic value equal to about thirteen shillings of our present money. No scilling that any Anglo-Saxon legislator ever dealt with had any such intrinsic value as this. Similarly the denarius, the true denarius of the republic and of the early empire, was a silver coin intrinsically worth about eightpence of our present currency. No penny in any Anglo-Saxon coinage ever approached this value; and the translation of denarius by penny has introduced confusion even into some well-known passages of the English Bible. Let us, therefore, for the sake of clearness, wholly disregard the pretended Roman equivalents, and confine our attention to the true, long-enduring Saxon denominations, the pund, the scilling and the penig.

1. The pund meant a pound’s weight of silver. It was purely a “money of account,” as no coin representing this value was ever struck by any Anglo-Saxon king. According to the present value of metals, it would be worth intrinsically somewhat less than £2 sterling.

2. The scilling was also only a money of account, represented by no actual coin. Its derivation (from scylan, to divide) seems to point to the fact that it was originally a portion of a silver ornament, probably a torque or an armlet broken off and cast into the scale, for payment by weight of the trader’s demand. Even so, as we may remember, St. Oswald ordered his beautiful silver dish to be broken up and distributed to the starving crowd, who would take these scyllingas into the market and exchange them there for the needed food. At a later time the scilling acquired a definite value, which, however, varied much in the different English kingdoms. The Kentish scilling was one-twelfth of a pound; the Wessex scilling, one-forty-eighth; and the Mercian, one-sixtieth.

3. But however much the scilling might vary, the penny (pending, pening or penig) seems in all the English kingdoms to have ever borne the same proportion to the pound which it bears at present, namely, as 1 to 240. This enables us to state the varying values of the scilling in the following manner:—

Here at last, in this lowest and humblest denomination, we get something which is not a mere “money of account”. The silver pennies of the Anglo-Saxon kings, which reach from the middle of the eighth century right down to the Norman conquest, and whose successors formed practically the only money of the country until the reign of Edward III., are the glory of the numismatic collector, but suggest strange thoughts as to the stage of civilisation reached by a country whose only coin was a little bit of silver, one-twentieth of an ounce in weight.

A few words must be said (1) as to the intrinsic value, and (2) as to the purchasing power of these moneys.

(1) As to the first question we are met by the practical difficulty of deciding what is the present value of silver. Not thirty years ago silver was worth fully 4s. 6d. an ounce, or £2 14s. a pound; now it fetches about half that price. But if we take, for convenience, the larger quotation, representing the old-fashioned ratio between gold and silver of 15½ to 1, we get roughly the following results:—

The pund = £2 14s. in intrinsic value.

(2) The “purchasing power” of money in those days is of course a different and a far more difficult question. As every one knows, since the discovery of America and the opening up of enormous fresh sources of supply of the precious metals, prices have been altogether revolutionised, and the “purchasing power” of an ounce of gold or silver has been enormously lessened.

The following are a few indications given us by the laws of Ine and some of his successors as to the prices prevalent in his time:—

1. An ewe with one lamb, 1 scilling (= 1s. 1½d.).

Present value, £2 10s. Ratio 1 to 44.

2. Maintenance of a peasant’s child, 6 scillings (6s. 9d.) per annum plus a cow in summer and an ox in winter.

Equivalent to our time to about £6. Ratio 1 to 17.

3. A peasant’s blouse was worth 6 peningas (1s. 4d.).

This was probably a rather elaborate affair, and if hand-worked might be worth at the present time £1 10s. Ratio 1 to 22.

4. A sheep’s fleece, 2 peningas (5½d.).

Present price, 7s. Ratio 1 to 15.

From the laws of Athelstan:—

5. A good horse, 24 scillings (£1 7s.).

Present price, £40. Ratio 1 to 30 nearly.

6. A sheep, 1 scilling (1s. 1½d.).

Present price, £2. Ratio 1 to 35.

From the law concerning the Dunsaete (Welsh mountaineers) (tenth century):—

7. A mare, 20 scillings (£1 2s. 6d.).

Present price, £25. Ratio 1 to 22.

8. A “swine,” 1⅗ scilling (1s. 10d.).

Present price, £1 10s. Ratio 1 to 16.

9. A sheep, 1 scilling (1s. 1½d.).

Present price, £2. Ratio 1 to 35.

10. A goat, ⅖ of a scilling (5½d.).

Present price, 15s. Ratio 1 to 33.

It will be seen from the above rough calculations how impossible it is to get any fixed proportion between the purchasing power of money in Anglo-Saxon times and in our own. As to one very important element, the price of grain, we have no satisfactory information; but from the records of later centuries (from the thirteenth onwards) it seems probable that, with frequent and violent fluctuations, it generally ruled relatively higher than the price of cattle.

On the whole, for historical purposes, if the reader mentally translates the scilling of Wessex into the pound sterling of our own day he will probably not go far wrong.

It may be well to add a few other monetary terms belonging chiefly to the later centuries of Anglo-Saxon history.

1. The Mancus was one-eighth of a pund: or 30 penings. The name is said to be derived from the Arabic. The Mancus in the time of Athelstan was the standard price of an ox.

2. The Thrymsa of Mercia was originally a gold coin (derived from the Roman tremissis), but afterwards the word was used to denote a unit of value, the equivalent of 3 penings.

3. The Sceatt was very nearly equivalent to the pening; but 250 not 240 went to the pund.

4. The Mark, a Danish word, denotes the equivalent of half a pound.

5. The Ora was the eighth part of a mark. It was held to be equivalent to 2½ scillings of Wessex, but there is some difficulty in the equation of these Danish and Saxon currencies. According to Domesday Book the Ore contained 20 pence, and accordingly the Mark would be equal not to 120 but to 160 pence. On the other hand, Ethelred’s laws, iv., 9, say that the pound contained 15 ores. This would make the Mark if it was half a pound equivalent to 7½ ores.

(See Chadwick, l.c., chapter i., for a discussion of this perplexing question.)