Moors independent of Bagdad

They had this sentiment and inspiration common to them all—their fighting religion; but the caliphs of Mahomet never showed any of that power of organisation, any of that capacity for governing a great empire from a single centre, which had been so remarkable in the Romans during the first hundred years or so after the birth of Christ. The capital, or chief place of residence of the caliphs, became, after a while, Bagdad, on the Euphrates. It was more central and convenient, no doubt, than a city in the Arabian desert. But, first of all, the ruler of the African province tried to assert himself as independent of the caliph; then the ruler of Spain, more distant still from the centre, claimed independence more strongly and successfully; and so it was also with other provinces in the circumference of the wide and constantly widening Empire. The links, as we say, of the Empire chain were not very solid or strong. But there was always this in common, to help keep all together—their religion. If the caliph in Bagdad had little or no control over the doings of the Moorish ruler of Spain, if the latter made war and peace and so on as seemed good to him without referring for orders to headquarters, the caliph still had some influence over him and his followers in religious matters, as being the representative and successor of Mahomet, who was Allah's prophet.

It was very like the power which the Roman Church, with the Pope at its head, had over the Christians. The Roman Empire, in a military sense, and in the sense of having Rome as the centre of its government and laws, had gone to pieces. There was no more "appealing unto Cæsar," or to any authority at Rome, from the decision of a court of law in some far-off province—as St. Paul appealed at Cæsarea—but still the Pope had his far-reaching power. The officials of government had gone from the cities of Gaul or of Britain or wherever it might be; but the clergy remained, and grew more and more in number, and the authority of the Pope of Rome—or even of the Pope from Avignon or Ravenna, for sometimes, as we shall see, he was obliged to fly from Rome—had its power over these clergy and through them over the laity. Ever since Constantine had made Christianity the State religion they had been servants and officials, in this manner, of the dying Empire and of the growing Church. The caliph's power was a like power, because he was the successor of Mahomet, though it was never, in its spiritual influence, of equal power with that of the successor of St. Peter. But the two may be compared, and the comparison is very interesting.

Charlemagne

So now we have brought the story to a point when we may very well pause a moment and take a look at the map, to see how things have been arranging themselves—to ask ourselves "Who's who?" in A.D. 800 and "Who has what?" It is on Christmas Day of that year that the mighty Charlemagne, the greatest king of the Franks, is consecrated Emperor by the Pope at Rome. That fact in itself tells a story.

But as for the world map of that time, you will remember how it was with our England, that the Anglo-Saxons, or one or other of those tribes from Jutland, held all the east; that the boundaries of Wessex went far west, where England is at its broadest; that Mercia was the Middle England, and that in the north was Northumbria, which went up to the southern limits of the Picts and Scots in Caledonia. The West Country, as we call it now, and Wales and the West of Cumberland, as well as Ireland, were still in the hands of the Celts.

There were Celts too on the Continent, in Brittany, and in parts of Spain.

Spain itself, with little exception, was held by the Moors, but of course the Gothic and Roman population, whom the conquering Moors found there, still remained there too. The Saracens also had all that Northern African strip as far east as Libya and Egypt. They had Egypt itself, Palestine, Syria and away to the east into India and so out of our picture. In Asia Minor they kept up a continual contest for many years with the Eastern Empire.

That Eastern Empire itself has become a poor possession in comparison with its extent at the date of the Roman Empire's division. It has a hold on the extreme South of Italy and it also claims the islands of Sardinia, Sicily, and of the Ægean Sea. It holds Asia Minor as far south as the borders of Mesopotamia and northwards to the Black Sea; but in those regions it is continually menaced by the Saracens. What we now call Turkey in Europe is within the Empire, and also the greater part of Thrace. It retains Greece; but of Macedonia it has scarcely any grip. Various barbarian tribes, Slavs, Serbs, Bulgars, have possession of the country up to the Danube.

CHARLEMAGNE'S SWORD. (From the Imperial Treasury, Vienna.)
CHARLEMAGNE'S SWORD.
(From the Imperial Treasury, Vienna.)

And as for the rest of the map, all that matters, all that does not belong to the north-eastern barbarians, falls into the Empire of Charlemagne. Pepin, King of the Franks before Charlemagne, had all that we call France and further had our Switzerland, Bavaria and, in the north, the present Holland and Belgium. He also was king of considerable territory east of the Rhine. But under Charlemagne those large possessions were very largely increased, eastward, and northward, and southward. Southward he held Italy right down to Naples. Eastward he had all the old Roman province of Illyricum; that is to say that his sovereignty extended to the Danube. Northward of the Danube, where that great river makes its southward bend, he held Bohemia. He had the land of the Saxons up to and beyond the Elbe. He ruled over Denmark and the south of Scandinavia.

The whole of the centre of the picture, in fact, is included in this Carolingian Empire, as it was called, from Carolus, the Latin form of Charles. And Charlemagne had been consecrated Emperor by the Pope at Rome. The Visigoths had been Christians, but they had not been orthodox Christians according to the opinion of the Church of Rome. They had been Arians; that is, followers of what the Roman Church considered the wrong and heretical opinion of a certain bishop called Arius. The Roman Church and the Pope of Rome could not have used the clergy of the Visigoths as their agents; the Pope could not have acted through such agents or worked with them. But he did, and he could, act through the Frankish clergy: and you see over how large a space of the world he could thus act and make his power felt.

In the Eastern Empire the Patriarch at Constantinople was the head of the Christian power. The Pope's authority did not extend there. Neither had it authority in Spain under the Mahommedan Moors. Indeed a large number of the Romans and Goths in Spain became Mahommedans, in order to enjoy the privileges and the lighter taxes which the Moslems imposed on Mahommedans. But the Pope had this very strong position as the head of the Church all over Charlemagne's Empire and beyond—for he was obeyed in Britain and in Ireland.

The great Empire of the great Charlemagne was not fated to last very long, as you will see; but it had served to help in establishing over all the central part of Europe the authority of the Church at Rome; and when it broke up, that authority was still maintained over the broken pieces of the Empire, no matter under what king they fell. Charlemagne repaid the Pope well for his consecration at Rome on Christmas Day of the year 800.

CHAPTER XI

THE FRANKS AND THE FEUDAL SYSTEM

Now, since the Franks occupied, for a while, so large an Empire, and were the principal people to establish the Pope's power, let us see what they did over this extent of Empire, what they made of it, what it became under them.

For the most part, we must realise they came into territory, as they moved westward, which had been conquered by the Romans and which had again been conquered, from the Romans, by barbarians of the Gothic tribes. So the Franks found a population partly Roman and partly Gothic there, when they came. They found Roman laws as the principal laws of the country, slightly altered, no doubt, by the Gothic customs, but much as the Romans had established them. They found cities built in the Roman way—that is, within a square of walls, with a gate in the centre of each wall and streets running straight through from one gate to the other opposite to it. That was the usual plan of the Roman cities, if the ground allowed of their building in this way; and the roads went on through the surrounding country, from one city to another, very straight, very well made, turning as little as possible to right or left, and only turning this little when a mountain over which, or a river through which, it was impossible to carry the road came in the way.

The Frankish tribes which penetrated into Gaul from time to time—themselves, probably, pushed westward by the Huns who came from further east again—were divided into two great groups, the Ripuarian Franks and the Salian Franks. The name Ripuarian was given to the tribes who settled along the "ripa," which is the Latin word for "bank," of the Rhine. The name Salian, of the other great group, as we have seen already, is of doubtful origin, perhaps from the "saline" or "salt" sea; because this group came from the shores of the Baltic.

For a long time Franks kept pushing in from the East through the Empire's wall. There were Franks with the Gothic and Roman army that defeated Attila at Chalons in the middle of the fifth century. The Salians seem to have been the latest of the Franks to come in, but they became so strong that they dominated all the rest.

I have spoken of those great kings of the Franks, Pepin and Charlemagne, but the king under whom the big work was done of bringing all the Frankish tribes, and indeed all Gaul, under one authority, and giving them that union which means strength—that king was earlier than either of these. His name was Clovis.

He became king of the Salian Franks in 481. The kings of his dynasty were called Merovingian, from Merovig, an old chieftain. He made himself master of the whole of Gaul, except of what was then called Burgundy and Provence, in the south. But you should know that this name Burgundy, derived from that of one of the Gothic tribes, was made to cover very different territories, under rulers of different races, at different times in our story.

The "counts"

So here was this King Clovis of the Franks ruling over this large Empire. He found the Roman law and the Roman system of government in use there; and the Franks adopted as much as they could of the Roman customs into their own. But it was difficult. The Roman official who had represented the government of the Empire was called the "comes," or "count," and the Merovingian kings of the Franks seem to have tried to continue to govern through the "count." One of his duties was to collect taxes, but the Franks do not seem to have understood taxation as it was understood by the Romans. The Romans made assessment, that is to say calculations, from time to time, to find out how much money was needed for the government of a province, and they exacted from the people of the province as much as was required to meet that need. Under the Franks the tax came to be a fixed amount on property.

The duty of the Count in levying the tax cannot have been easy, for these Franks were one and all fighting men. In their own country the practice had been to hold an assembly of the tribe for the making of laws and judging cases. That was their idea of government. It was a plan which might work well for a small tribe. It was not suitable for a large empire.

The consequence is that we soon see the Count, and other men of rank and of large possessions in land, becoming more and more independent of the king, who really could not make his authority felt. One of the difficulties that the king found, arose from the custom, which was a Roman custom, of granting "immunities," as they were called, to certain persons and institutions. They were granted especially to institutions connected with the Church. They provided that the lands to which they were given should be "immune from" visits by the king's officials. The great man, or the great institution, to whom or to which the immunity was granted thus became like a small king, within his own kingdom. He could do almost as he pleased.

So there was always this trouble, and it grew greater as time went on, that the king's authority was more and more disputed, more and more weakened; and in this weakening of authority the security for life and for property grew weaker. The poorer people found that their best hope for a secure life was to put themselves under the protection of some rich and powerful man; that rich and powerful man found that his best hope for safety was to take under his protection as many as possible of these people, who, in return for the protection, would fight for him on occasion.

And this, shortly put, was, in the main, what brought about the state of society known as the feudal system.

It was the more easy for the lesser men, the vassals, and the great man, the lord, to make these terms with each other, because something of the kind was already in existence, both in the Germany from which the Franks came and in the Roman and Gothic society into which they had come as conquerors.

The name given to the assembling of men of less power and wealth around the greater men had been "comitatus," in Germany. In Rome it had been the custom for a prominent citizen to have a troop of "clientes," or clients, men of the people who came to him to ask him for advice about any legal claims that they were making, or any injustice under which they were suffering. They would receive his advice, and perhaps he would speak for them when their case came before the court. In return, these clients would support their patron, as the great man was called, with their votes whenever they could be of use to him, and they would even accompany him about the city, in times of disturbance, as a kind of bodyguard.

The Frankish kings, we may note, had a bodyguard for their special protection, and this bodyguard was held in very high estimation, so much so that if one of them were killed the killer, or his relations, had to pay a penalty three times as heavy as they would have had to pay for the killing of any other free man. So the service of the vassal to his feudal lord was only an extension of the kind of service that the client did for the patron; and so too the service of protection that the lord gave to the vassal might easily grow out of the protection and help given by the patron, to the client.

The "precarium"

And then there was another custom common in the Roman and Gothic society which helped to form the relationship between the vassal and the feudal lord. If a free man were landless he was in a very poor position. It was beneath his dignity to serve as a slave, or even as a "villein," which was a position in society between that of a slave and a free man. But if he were without land, he had no means of livelihood; and as his life was of no value to anyone he had no one to defend him. Therefore it had become usual for these landless free men to come to some large land-owner and offer him to do him certain service if he would grant, or lend, them a piece of land, or possibly the use of a mill—a water-mill for grinding corn—or some other grant out of which they might get a livelihood. If this were granted them, they would give their service and help to the lord. The Latin word for "to pray" is "precari," and so this relationship between the lord and the tenant was called "precarium," because the tenant had "prayed" the lord for it. I have called it a "grant, or loan." It was not a gift, because the lord might take it back at any time, and so end the tenancy, nor could the tenant pass on his right in the land, or whatever it might be, to his heirs. If the lord did allow it to go on to these heirs, they would probably have to pay him some "fine," before they succeeded to it, as well as undertaking to continue the service which the first tenant, when the grant was made, had promised.

So herein, that it could be taken back by the lord, it was like a loan; and yet it differed from a loan in this—that there was no idea in the mind of either the lord or the tenant that it was likely to be taken back. It was intended to be a permanent loan, if we may use that expression, but still it was recognised on both sides that the lord or the lord's successors had the power at any moment of taking it back, if he or they pleased, from the tenant and the tenant's successors. You must have heard the expression "a precarious possession," or something of the kind. You may now know how that expression arose. The word "precarious" is, of course, from this "precarium," which is derived from the Latin word for "to pray."

You will find that these two ideas, that of the relation between the patron and client, and that between the landlord and the "precarious" tenant, helped to form the foundations, the roots, from which the feudal system grew up. The land or the mill was the fee, or fief (fief was the French form of the word) in return for holding which the holder owed service to the lord.

Just what he should do for the lord, by way of service, differed in different places at first, and was determined by the different customs of each place; but as time went on the duties began to be defined, or laid down, more exactly, and grew to be very much the same wherever the system prevailed. The vassal had to follow his lord to war when called on, he had to serve as a defender when the lord was attacked, he was liable to have to contribute to the dowry of the lord's daughter when she was married and to his lord's ransom if he should be taken prisoner by the enemy. He had to follow the lord to battle armed at his own cost, perhaps mounted, perhaps with some of his villeins following him.

You can realise that when the country was in a very disturbed state, so that the king's authority could not easily and quickly be enforced, the lord who had many of these tenants or vassals could do very much as he pleased on his own territories. You will also realise that when men could no longer get justice from the central authority, which the king represented, they were only too grateful to get it from their feudal lord.

Divisions in Gaul

And the condition of Gaul under the Franks began to be a condition of general disturbance after the death of the great King Clovis. He died in 511 and he left his kingdom divided between his four sons. The youngest of these sons, by name Clotaire, lived longer than any of his brothers, but on his death, in 561, he in turn left four sons, and again there was division of the kingdom, claims were made by one and were resisted by another. There was continual civil war. Yet again, a few years later, there were new divisions amongst the children of one or other of these, and so it went until the kingdom was once more united, after 613, by the death or defeat of his rivals, under Clotaire II. Clotaire was nominally sovereign, yet still there were the subordinate kingdoms, each claiming some independence.

But during this century, when the Frankish conquerors were fighting with each other, the general condition of society had been altered. We have seen how the large landowners began drawing to themselves a body of vassals, and how they gradually became more independent of the king's authority. We have to notice at the same time that the power of the Church, in the hands of its bishops, was continually growing greater. The Church was constantly being enriched by donations of land given it by pious persons who deemed that they might find salvation by these gifts; and what made the Church the more powerful was the above-mentioned custom of granting "immunities."

The "immunities" were granted by the Crown, in return for some service done, or by way of payment of a debt, or as an act of mere friendliness; and the meaning of the "immunity" was that the land in respect of which it was granted was "immune" from the king's tax collectors or law officers. The Crown officials could not enter on it. The taxes were collected and the law administered by persons acting for the landowner. You see how this again would work towards making the great landowners independent of the Crown. And these "immunities" were largely given to the bishops in respect of the Church lands. The bishops thus grew to great independence and power, and they worked continually to have their own people, the subordinate clergy, subject to their own laws, the laws of the Church, and not to the laws of the Crown.

Now at the court of the Merovingian kings and also of the lesser kings, the chief officer and chief executor of the king's will was an official called "the Mayor of the Palace." He was everywhere a man of great influence and of high family. He acted not so much like an English Prime Minister as like the vizier, the chief officer, of an Oriental king.

As time passed, in the constant distractions of the kingdom and the weakening power of the central authority, the power of these high officials grew continually.

The distractions and the struggles between the lesser kingdoms in Gaul, and also between the nobles and the king, went on for another century. The contest which really settled the matter, for a while, was a battle at Tertry in 687, in which Pepin, Pepin II., as he was called, defeated the king's forces, and took the king prisoner. It was not, however, till the middle of the next century that the line of the Merovingian kings died out. All that while, however, they were practically dominated by Pepin, the victor at Tertry, and when their dynasty came to an end he became king of the Franks, and therewith founded a new dynasty, the Carolingian.

Charles Martel

Pepin came to the throne with powers derived from two sources. His family had held the great office of Mayor of the Palace in one of the subordinate kingdoms for nearly half a century, and he was also descended from a great bishop, Arnulf. Thus he had all the power of the Church on his side. Charles Martel, who succeeded him, gained an important victory over the Saracens at Tours in 732. That is a very notable event in our story, for it pushed back the Moors south of the Pyrenees again, and freed Christian Gaul from their danger. Further, this same Charles (Martel, or the Hammer, as he was called) served the Church of Rome faithfully in Germany, supporting a mission which Bishop Boniface was carrying on for the conversion of some of the still pagan German tribes to Christianity.

The Pope, Gregory III., on his accession to the Papal throne, was menaced by the Lombards in the North of Italy and by independent Dukes in the south. He appealed to Charles Martel for assistance. The Lombards, however, had fought with Charles at Tours, to save Christendom from the Saracens, and Charles did not care to take arms against them. But the son of Charles, who succeeded him as Pepin III., seems to have understood how greatly his power would be strengthened if he could claim to be supported by the Church. The authority of the Pope at Rome was becoming every year more powerful; Boniface had now the title of Papal Legate, the Pope's representative, and as such he anointed Pepin III. king of the Franks, in the presence of the great nobles, at the capital city of Soissons. Within two years Pepin had defeated the Lombards and rid the Pope of their menace. He did not take their kingdom, but the territory that he conquered from them he gave to the Papal See. Thus he made the Papacy—that is to say, the successive Popes of Rome—a territorial sovereignty, owning extensive land and much wealth. At the same time he accepted a title, that of "patrician," from the Pope. It was a title which had meant much in the days of ancient Rome. It meant nothing now, except that it was a sign of the close links that bound together the Frankish kingdom and the Papacy. But that in itself meant much, for these were the two most powerful forces in the Western world of that time, and both were growing stronger every year.

By the time of Pepin's death, in 768, he was king of all Gaul.

He left two sons, and to the younger, before an assembly of his nobles, he bequeathed certain provinces; but, fortunately perhaps for the peace of France, the younger son died and all came into the hand of the elder, who was Charles the Great.

And by this time that custom which we have seen growing common, of vassals leaguing themselves together around a lord, had established itself over a great part of the Empire. The feudal system had really become a fact, although it was a fact which was concealed by the power and the splendour of this great emperor, who was so constantly victorious.

The big territorial landowners became "Counts" and the lands over which they exercised authority were called "counties." We noted the origin of the title a few pages back. Sometimes counties, two or more, had been drawn together into a single larger domain, which might then be called a "duchy," with a "duke," or, in French, "duc," over it. But Charlemagne's policy was to break up the duchies and collect their revenues and taxes by his own officers as the originally appointed "Counts" had collected them. Even when the feudal system was fully established, the powers of the lords were not unlimited, by any means, and they governed within the bounds of their lands largely through the "curia," or assembly, summoned from time to time, of the vassals. The king, as well as the lords beneath him, would summon a "curia," and this was called the "curia regis," the king's curia, when it was the assembly of the king's vassals and was summoned by him. There seems to have been no limit to the points that might be discussed in these assemblies; but the lord's assent to any vote passed by them appears to have been required before the measures voted on could be put into operation.

Pope and Emperor

Now the help that Charlemagne gave to the Pope was valuable to him not only against the Lombard foreigners, but against the Roman nobles themselves. It was the Pope, the Bishop, and not the Duke, of Rome who appealed to Charlemagne; and that very fact shows how far the position of the Pope had altered from that of the early bishops of the Church. He had become ruler of a territory, of a great city, even of a State. And yet he had little force of arms with which to defend this possession, which had come to him by the donations of pious Christians. Pepin, we have noted, had given him lands recovered from the Lombards. But the great men in Rome, the great families, constantly disputed the Pope's authority over the city and the State. To have the Emperor as his ally gave the Pope a power against which they could do little.

Under Charlemagne the Frankish Empire grew to its greatest extent and splendour, but it had no rest.

One of the reasons of the Emperor's success in keeping his nobles in tolerable obedience was, doubtless, that he kept them so busy, fighting his battles. He subjected the Northmen (later, Normans) who had come down from Scandinavia in their ships and settled themselves along the northern shores of France, facing Britain. Afterwards this land of the Northmen had the name of Normandy.

The Saxons, occupying what later were called the Netherlands, put up a surprisingly strong opposition to the great Emperor, but in the end he conquered their independence. Elsewhere, around his ever-extending boundaries, the smaller nations gave him less trouble. In the end it is not too much to say that his Empire included all of what we know as France and Germany with Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and parts of Scandinavia. Southward he held the northern parts of Italy, nearly as far down as Rome. He crossed the Pyrenees, but gained no lasting hold on any of Spain. Indeed, it was on return from a Spanish expedition that he suffered the greatest disaster that ever befel his arms. This was the defeat of a large body of his forces at Roncesvalles, in which fight were killed the great hero Roland and a number of the most illustrious of the Frankish leaders and nobles.

In later years both Charlemagne himself and his great men, such as Roland and others, his paladins, and "the twelve peers," were made the subjects of the most extravagant stories. They were related to have performed superhuman exploits, to have been eight feet in height and to have conducted themselves generally in a manner which Cervantes, the Spanish novel writer, caricatured in his famous story of Don Quixote. The twelve peers may remind us of the twelve knights of King Arthur's Round Table, and it is likely that there was some original connection between the stories.

But Charlemagne was truly Charles the Great without these fabulous additions to his greatness. He died at Aix la Chapelle in 814 and was succeeded by his only surviving son, whom he had crowned with his own hand the year before his death.

CHAPTER XII

HOW THE PEOPLE LIVED

In this and the next chapters I propose to attempt a sketch of the way in which the tribes of the Goths lived, whether in the Empire of Charlemagne or in our own island. And because the island story must be of the greater interest to us, seeing that it is our own, I shall try to describe the mode of life of the people there, and will ask you to accept that description as giving the type or pattern of the life on the Continent also.

The feudal system did not develop in England precisely as it developed on the Continent of Europe.

This is a statement which may surprise you, for you will no doubt know that the feudal system did exist in England at a rather later date and that the principal part of England's story for many a year was made up of fights between the feudal barons themselves and of combinations of the barons against the king. But this feudalism was brought into England by the Norman kings, after William I.'s conquest in 1066, and again there was a fresh importation of feudal practices under those French kings of the House of Anjou—thence called Angevins—who reigned both over England and over a large slice of France.

But it did not spring up in England like a growth from the soil, as it did in Charlemagne's empire. It had not the same roots in England. The Anglo-Saxon had not quite the same customs of the comitatus, the body-guard devoted to the king or chief, as the Franks had, nor was England as familiar as France with the Roman customs of the patrocinium—the relation of patron and client—and the precarium—the tenure of land granted in answer to a prayer—out of which the relations between the feudal lord and his vassal so easily grew. Moreover, you will remember that the Anglo-Saxon possession of our England did not include the whole of the island. There were still Britons along the western fringe and there were Picts north of the Forth. And even the land that the Anglo-Saxon did hold was not one kingdom, but divided into three main divisions, to say nothing of some lesser divisions. There were the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex, to name them in their order from north to south.

At one time we hear of the "Heptarchy," or seven kingdoms, but the number really might be stated equally well as more or less than seven, according as this or the other collection of tribes were reckoned as independent.

Therefore the kingdoms were small, so that the kings, if they had any strong rule at all, could make their ruling strength felt all over their kingdoms. We have seen that one of the reasons why the feudal system came into being on the Continent was that the king was not able, in disturbed times, to make good his authority far from his own headquarters. That failure to make good was less likely to occur to the ruler of the small kingdoms into which England was divided.

The English lose their freedom

But what did happen in England was that the free man, the man who owned his own piece of land as a freehold, gradually became less free. In the system of tribal government which the Gothic tribes brought westward with them, it had been the custom for the free men of the tribe (the ceorls, or churls) to come together at certain times and pass laws and try cases that arose under the laws. They were called together by the king and by the chief men (the eorls, or earls) and they voted on any subject that came before the assembly. And still, in England, the freemen had the right to come up to the assemblies and vote. But, though the kingdoms were not very large, they were larger, no doubt, than the territories held by the tribes in their Eastern homes. It was a long way for the voters to come to the assemblies. They had their business, as towns began to grow, to occupy them. Perhaps their agriculture, their mill, or their cattle needed their attention. At all events, however it happened, they ceased to go to the assemblies, and the result, of course, was that the king and the earls got more and more of the law-making and of the decision of cases into their own hands, and the ordinary freeman, though still in name free, and still with his right to vote, came to have less and less power and had to obey the decisions of the king and his council of earls more and more. They had no arrangement by which they might make their wishes known at the assembly by means of a representative appointed by themselves, as our voters now are able to make their wishes known by appointing their Member of Parliament and sending him to Westminster to speak for them. In theory all the old English voters were members of their parliament, so to call it. They could all go to it and speak and vote. But, owing to the difficulties of going, and the distance, the result was that they did not go at all, and so had no one to represent their views in the government under which they were supposed to be free, and in which they were all supposed to have an equal share in governing. They continued, however, to have the power to vote in their more local assemblies, in the "hundred court," which was something like an enlarged parish council of a few villages, and in the "shire court," or council of the shire, formed by the union of many villages. How these courts were formed, you shall read in the next chapter. It seems to be rather doubtful whether the people availed themselves much of these powers. They probably became more and more content to leave the business of government to the chief men.

These three kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex were constantly striving together for the mastery. Our unfortunate land can have known very little peace until Egbert, who ruled all England from 827 to 836, did succeed in bringing the kingdoms under his sole authority. The rulers of the Franks do not seem to have made any attempt to extend their wide empire so as to include our islands. Charlemagne, however, took much interest in the course of affairs in England, and at one time there was a project of marrying his son to a daughter of the King of Mercia. The project was not accomplished; and at a moment when Mercia was at her strongest, so that there did seem a possibility of her overcoming the other divisions of the country and uniting all under one rule, Charlemagne's influence was exerted to restore the King of Northumbria to his throne. The fact is that the Frankish policy towards England was, not to attempt its conquest, but to thwart its own efforts towards unity, so as to keep it divided, and by reason of its divisions, weak. But to the English generally, Charlemagne showed much favour and they were well received at his court. He had assumed the position of head, with the Pope, of the Catholic Church, and that position in itself gave him a reason and an excuse for interfering, as he did, with Church matters in England.

CANTERBURY.
CANTERBURY.

I have said that the English were well received at the court of the great Emperor. You may take that to mean that the English were by no means, at this far-away date, shut up in their own island. They often went to and from the Continent and even to Rome; and Roman emissaries, priests and bishops, were constantly coming to England.

To get a true picture in your minds of the country, both in England and in other parts of Europe, it is almost necessary first to dismiss from your minds the picture as you know it to-day. Whereas, now, you see for the most part, as you travel by train or motor, cleared land, open fields, and here and there woodland, you have to imagine a land at that time universally covered by wood, with only here and there clearances made by man. Along the tops of the downs, however, exposed to the high winds, there would be very little growth of trees. The woodland would be full of game and of wild creatures. There would be deer, and wolves preying on the deer.

You must imagine a population extraordinarily less numerous than it is now. Even in 1087, when Domesday Book, which contained a "census" of all England, was made, the population is given at 1,500,000. For the most part we may suppose the people living rather after the manner in which the Gothic tribes lived in their own country—in clearances, or what we might call villages, in the midst of the wild wood and in the river valleys. But there would be some towns, larger villages gradually growing, and these towns you would probably find beginning to be surrounded by a protecting wall of raised earth and palings with gates that were shut at nightfall. Generally the houses, both in the villages and in the towns, would be of timber and clay, built as I will shortly describe; but after a while the churches and the great men's houses, and the fortified castles would be of stone. There is what we call Saxon stonework still to be seen both in England and in other parts of Europe.

Now through this green wood, which generally covered our England, there would be roads and tracks. All the travelling by land would be on foot or on horseback. The use of wheels for vehicles was known even to the Britons before the coming of the English, for they had their war-chariots; but even where the Romans had made their fine roads it is not likely that, after all the years since the Romans left the island, these roads would not have fallen into such disrepair that no wheeled thing could go along them far without sticking in the mud.

Modes of travel

For another fact, that you have to realise about the country of that day, is that it was not only far more wooded than it is now: it was also far more marshy. The rivers ran more broadly, their banks were wider. All the neighbourhood of Westminster, for instance, was a swamp, and the Thames, because it was so wide, was far less deep and it was fordable there. Men and horses could walk through it, perhaps on some stones thrown into the bed, and certainly it must have been far less deep and far more wide than it is now.

Because of this marshiness of the lower grounds, the roads by which people travelled went as much as possible along the upper, the harder and drier, ground, sometimes following a line near the top of the downs. The tracks or byways from the woodland and valley villages rose up out of the lowland as quickly as the ground would allow and went up to join the older roads along the downs. But, in spite of all that, you must realise that the rivers were really the great means of communication. They were the chief roads and highways; and the proof of that is that it is always low down, by a river, that all the old towns and the big church establishments and buildings were made. There are Canterbury, London, Winchester, Oxford, Paris, Rouen and very many more that you will think of. Not a river of any size that did not have a town springing up on its banks, and not a town of any size springing up anywhere except on a river's bank.

And the way in which the English and other Gothic people formed their homes and lived their lives appears to have been very different from the way of life of the older Celts. We have seen that the Anglo-Saxons, when they came to England, established themselves in the river valleys and in the woodland country; but there is evidence that those earliest inhabitants of whom we know anything, the Celts, who were here before the Romans, lived more on the upper lands, on the Downs. This is shown by the relics which the plough and the spade discover for us, on these upper levels, and also by those extraordinary large stone rings of which the most famous is that at Stonehenge, although it is certain that only a few hundred years ago the stones at Avebury near Marlborough must have encircled a very much larger area. Most of the Avebury stones have been broken up now by the farmers to make roads and houses.

Lines of travel

The great stone circles had to do with the religion of which the Druids were the priests, and you should note that this Avebury, near Marlborough, is a very central spot, in England. It is on high ground, and we know that many tracks or roadways led from it as a centre, going out like spokes of a wheel. Also you may notice that many of the rivers radiate out from that central high ground and find their way thence in different directions to the sea. Probably that part of the country was looked on as particularly sacred because it was so central.

Now for people coming to England from the Continent of Europe, the easiest way to come, because it was the shortest sea-passage, would be across the Channel at, or near, Dover. Thence, if they wanted to get into the heart of England, they would be prevented from going northward by the Thames. They could not cross the Thames on foot or on horse till they came to London, where the Romans made their Watling Street, as it was called, across the river and thence up to Chester.

But as a matter of fact they were more likely to wish to go westward than northward, because it was in the west of England that those things of value lay for which, in the old days, people did come from the Continent to England—that is the lead and tin that were in the mines. These lay in the west of England and in Ireland. In Ireland, in the Wicklow mountains, some gold was found. So, then, going westward, these people came to the meeting of the roads at or about Avebury and the Salisbury Plain country.

On those high downs and on that thin soil there would be few and small trees. The woodland would be all below, say rising not much more than 500 feet above sea-level. Therefore this high country gave the best and easiest land for the living of a people who were in the pastoral stage; that is, had flocks and herds. It was, and it still is, good sheep land. And it did not need clearing.

The Anglo-Saxons came with somewhat different habits. They had been used to living in the woodlands and the river valleys, rather than on open downs; and therefore it was to the lower lands that they naturally resorted. They established themselves in villages there, as they had been established in their homes across the Channel.

I would remind you again that I am trying to tell you the story of how these people came and settled in England, and how the kind of life that they lived has developed into the kind of life that we lead now, not only because it is our very own English story, and therefore of the closest interest to us, but also because it is in much the same way that the Gothic tribes settled and developed over most of the Frankish Empire and also where the Visigoths lived, in Spain, both while they were the actual rulers of Spain and also in the times of the Moorish conquest of that country. So that it is the story of a great part of the world, and of the part most important for the world's progress, that we may see being enacted on a small scale in our own island.

Saxon houses

In the river valleys, then, these incoming Saxons would establish themselves on some firm and not too marshy bit of land. There they would build the houses of their villages. And the houses, at first, were built in this manner: they would either leave four tree stems, as they cleared the woodland, or else would drive four poles into the ground, to form the corners of the projected house, which we will call ABCD. Then they would bring together and fasten together, at their tops, the trunks or poles A and B and the poles C and D, so that they came like this house shape. Thus they got the shape of the house. You may note that this is somewhat the shape of that Gothic arch, which became so important in later building. The house, at first, was divided into two rooms, at most, in one of which the men lived and in the other the women. The builders threw a roofing pole across, from the top of one of the arches--that is to say, from the point at which the poles A and B were fastened together, to the top of the other arch, where C and D were fastened together. This made the "roof tree." Then they put struts, or strengthening pieces of wood, across from one pole to the other, about at the height where the poles began to bend most sharply so as to come together. The usual distance from each of the poles, as between A and B, and also between C and D, where they entered the ground, was 16 feet. Thus they had the frame of the house constructed.

Then they would apply slighter rods of timber to the sides, in the kind of weaving way in which you must have seen those hurdles made which are used very generally in England for penning sheep. It is what is called wattle work—the rods going in and out, under and over each other. Then they would plaster up the crevices with clay, "daubing" it, as it is called, so that the whole work is called "wattle and daub." That is how their houses were made, or somehow like that. I will not affirm that it was just in the order that I have mentioned that each of the processes was performed, but it is tolerably sure that it was somewhat thus that those Saxons and most of the German tribes made their houses.

AN ANGLO-SAXON MANSION.
AN ANGLO-SAXON MANSION.

In the houses of the wealthier people the walls were often hung with tapestry, woven and worked by the Anglo-Saxon ladies, who were skilful in spinning and in needlework. These tapestries were hung from hooks, tenter-hooks, from which we have our proverb of "being on tenter-hooks." They served to exclude the draught, as well as for adornment, for probably the "wattle and daub" was not always wind proof.

And then there was a hole at the top of the roof to let out the smoke of the fire, which would be lighted in the centre of the room, or hall. The houses had no chimneys. Sometimes they had windows for light, but these were only slits in the walls—not glazed.

They did know something of the use of glass, for they had glass drinking-vessels, as well as vessels of wood and of silver. The horns of the cattle were used for the same purpose. For the furniture of their houses they had tables, generally of a round shape. There are several quaint pictures, adorning old manuscripts, showing them seated, or standing, at dinner. They had benches and stools, but no movable seats, as it seems. The seat they called a "sett"—a thing to "settle," or "sit" on. We still use the word "settle" for a kind of sofa, and "stool" comes from the same Anglo-Saxon word. We are learning now not only the story of the beginning of our own ways of life, but also much of the story of our own words and way of talking.

In the better houses the seat and table at which the heads of the family sat were raised on a flooring a little above the level of the rest, on what was called a dais. This would only be in the bigger houses. The dinner and other meals were always served in the hall, or larger room, which really was the one important part of the house. The apartments for the women were sometimes adjoining the hall, under the same roof, but sometimes "the lady's bower," as it was called, was a small separate building. Bed places, like berths in a ship's cabin, were often arranged for the men along the sides of the great hall, screened off by a curtain. You will understand that the better and larger a house was, and the wealthier its owner, the more it would have of these fittings and conveniences. Most of the houses in the ordinary village we may suppose to have been almost altogether without them.

AN ANGLO-SAXON DINNER-PARTY. (From Wright's <i>Homes of Other Days</i>.)
AN ANGLO-SAXON DINNER-PARTY.
(From Wright's Homes of Other Days.)

Often, in the large houses, they would have one or more minstrels playing to them as they ate, for they were fond of music and of the dance, and of various games. The Romans had left, in Britain, the tradition of their games and gladiators' exhibitions in the amphitheatres, and these had not been forgotten. The Saxons may have come into that tradition and adopted the games, or they may have brought their own. They had games that were a kind of mimic warfare, with bows and arrows and javelin or dart throwing, which no doubt served to keep them in practice for the frequent wars which the kings waged together and for which a contingent from each village was required.

Their chief food seems to have been bread, with butter, cheese, and milk. This shows how much they depended on their live-stock, even though they seldom, as we may suppose, ate fresh meat. But they had poultry and ate much fish, and had a few vegetables, such as beans, besides the wild produce of the woods, like blackberries, mushrooms, nuts, and so on. They brewed beer, and mixed it with honey to make the favourite drink called "mead." A little wine came in from the Continent; but only the rich men could afford that.

To give them light, we know that they had candles, made both of the tallow, the fat of animals, and of wax, from the bees, and they also used lamps, holding oil, with a wick from the spout, like the Roman lamps.

As a rule, in the villages established in the woodland, where the houses were not close together, on the sides of a road, or in a circle, but were scattered among the cleared places, a mound of earth with a hedge on top was thrown up round about it. It was called by the Saxon word from which we have our word "wall"; but it hardly was what we should call a wall. Perhaps it was partly to protect the home garden, which lay within it, from strolling cattle and wild creatures, and partly for defence against enemies. There is evidence that the Anglo-Saxon ladies were fond of flowers and of their gardens.

Where the houses lay alongside a road, and especially beside what was called a "street" (which meant one of the paved Roman roads, from stratum, meaning a paved surface), this surrounding wall or mound would not be made.

Walled houses

As time passed they began to make improvements in their houses. The first improvement seems to have been to build walls, up to about the height of a man's head—timber walls only at first—making use of trunks that had grown with a bend in them, as the corner posts, for the arch. From that came the occasional use of stone for the walls, where stone was easily to be found, or of brick, where there was clay convenient for the baking; but for very many years wood was the usual material for the building of all except the great houses, churches, castles, and the like. Of course it was very inflammable, and you know how, even as late down in our story as the date (1666) of the great fire of London, the destruction was so complete because almost all the houses were of wood.

CHAPTER XIII

HOW THE PEOPLE LIVED—continued

It is likely that some of the Celts, before the coming of the later invaders, had begun to descend from their hill villages and to occupy the river valleys and clearings in the woodlands; but we do not know much of their story, and have to piece it together as best we may from the signs of their residence which they have left. Both before the Roman occupation of Britain and also for two or more centuries afterwards, we do not know at all clearly what went on in our island.

But about the Saxons, nearly from their first coming to England, we have written evidence to give us information. We know something of how their village societies were formed, and these societies are extremely interesting to us, because we can see from them how our present way of living came about, how the landowner and the tenant, the squire and the agricultural labourer came to be.

How people lived

The villages, then, in these Saxon times, consisted of a group of the "wattle and daub" houses formed in the manner that you have seen. If they were built near one of the roads, the houses would be on either side of the road, forming something like what we call "the village street" now. If they were not near a road they would often be arranged in a circle, with a clear space in the middle. In this clear space, surrounded by the houses, we may see the earliest form of the modern "village green."

And then, outside the circle of houses would be the lands which the villagers held and worked. There would be a certain area of this land which would be cultivated, with the plough, for crops, and, further, outside that there would be land which would be grazed by the villagers' cattle and sheep. It would be what we call "common land," and any freeman in the village would have the right to turn out on it a certain fixed number of animals. Besides this there would be a certain area of ground beyond again, called "the waste," where the pigs of the villagers might be turned out to feed in the woods. This area also was defined by law, so that it should not run into the area allotted to a neighbouring village.

Now the area of cultivated land held by each of the ceorls (the churls, or free peasants) in the village was generally fixed at thirty acres. It was reckoned that thirty acres was the limit that a team of oxen could plough and keep in order during the year. But a team was reckoned to consist of eight oxen, and each ceorl was only allowed one pair of oxen.

You will see what this implies. It implies that they shared their oxen among them, four of the proprietors coming together, with two oxen each, to make up a team. Thus there was sharing in the oxen and in the ploughing work that the oxen did, as well as in the common grazing land. I want you to notice, as a great feature of the early village life, this sharing or community, this having many things in common.

Then there were the cattle and the flocks and the pigs; and these would all need looking after. But each owner did not look after his own. On the contrary, a herdsman for the cattle, a shepherd for the sheep, and a swineherd for the pigs were appointed.

The ceorls were not the only freemen. There was a class of freemen, too, of less importance than these holders of thirty acres. They had to do some of the work under the thirty-acre men; and perhaps it was from their class that the swineherd and the shepherd were taken. Another man who was employed in the same way, as a servant of the community, was the miller, the corn-grinder.

Below this lower class of freemen, again, came the serfs, the slaves. In the earliest known documents that show us what the duties and rights of the freemen in the villages were, there is no mention at all of the rights and duties of the serfs, because, as a matter of fact, they had, in law, no rights, and to their duties there was no limit. They had to do what they were bid, and their masters had as much authority over them as over cattle. They were indeed owned as "chattels," or cattle. But it does not follow that they were ill-treated, for a wise master would not treat even his cattle or his sheep ill. He would treat them well, because the stronger and healthier they were the more work they would do for him or the more milk or wool they would give him. It was to his interest to be kind to both the two-legged and the four-legged cattle. The slaves were members of the conquered race for the most part.

Eorls and cheorls

And then, besides the ceorls, and probably at first chosen by them and from among them, was the eorl. His business was to look after the community in a general way, to preside at its meetings, to act as its judge, and as its leader in case of quarrels with the neighbours. In return, he had portions of land given to him amidst the portion of the ceorls, and the ceorls had to work the land for him, or to get it worked for him by their slaves. Generally the law was that they had to give him so many days' work during the week. That is the way in which their work was measured. They thus paid him what was really very like a rent for his land, and as time went on it was more and more in the light of what we call rent that it was regarded. Similarly, when they brought corn to the mill to be ground, they had to put a certain portion of the ground corn into a chest especially kept there for the eorl. And here again, this paying in of the corn came to convey the idea that the mill belonged to the eorl and that this was a payment for the privilege of grinding the corn there. Thus the eorl came more and more into the position of owner of the land and of all in the village.

Besides the duties that the eorl owed to the ceorls, and the duties they owed to him, he himself had duties that he owed to the king. These were chiefly three, to follow the king to war, to maintain the bridges within the boundaries of the village lands, and to help build the fortified places, the castles. He also had to see that the king's taxes were paid, when taxes began to be imposed. And just as, out of the payments of service and of corn made by the ceorls to the eorl, the idea grew that these payments were made as a kind of rent for the land, of which the eorl was the owner, so too, as between the eorl and the king, the services that the eorl owed and paid began to be looked on as payments made by the eorl for the land which he held from the king. Therefore the whole land of the country began to be regarded as in the king's possession and to be rented, as we should say, from him by the eorls, by whom it was again in part "sub-let," to use our modern term, to the ceorls or peasants.

As we have seen, the area that it was considered right for the ceorl to hold was thirty acres, but in various ways this might be divided or added to, so that the original equality did not last long. And as the population grew, more land had to be taken in, from the waste, for cultivation, to provide for younger sons.

The eorls had a curious power of forbidding, if they so pleased, the marriages proposed by the ceorls and their children. Perhaps the power was originally voted to them by the ceorls themselves as a means of controlling the population, so that there should not be more people than the available land could support; but it is a curious power for any authority to have over men who called and believed themselves "free." But the fact is that the so-called freedom of these men became more and more of an illusion; they became less and less free.

After Christianity was accepted as the religion of England there was another person, besides those already mentioned, who had a right to be supported by the community of the village. This was the priest, and the tenth of some of the produce, which was allotted as his share, in return for his services as priest, is the origin of those "tithes" which still are paid to the clergy.

All payments were, for a long time, made "in kind," that is to say, for instance, in corn, or in wool or milk, or in so many days' work. Coined metal, as what we call "a medium of exchange," had been known in England for a very long while, even before the coming of the Romans, but its use does not seem to have been common. After a while, however, its use increased, and gradually payment in coin, by the ceorls to the eorl, began to take the place of payment in kind, and the eorl might welcome the coin because of its ease of transmission to the king when the king required money for his wars.

The chapmen

At first, as you will see from all this, the villages were very much what we call self-supporting. They had all they required for food. They had the wool of their sheep and the hides of their cattle to be worked up into clothing. They had unlimited firewood from the forest. So they had little need of money, for exchange. But as they became more rich than their own needs demanded, in such things as wool and hides and the foods that did not perish quickly, such as cheese, then they might begin to exchange these things for other produce which they could not make for themselves, and which might be brought in by the travelling merchants, called "chapmen" (from the word "cheap," to sell, whence we have the London street, called Cheapside, to-day). These chapmen came on horseback with their wares and bought and sold in the villages, and then it became most useful to have coin as a means of exchange. Even the wool was a bulky stuff to carry; yet it was less inconvenient than some of the other commodities. The two chief articles of necessity that the villagers could not supply themselves with were iron implements and salt.

This wool-selling of the villages, we may be sure, was done in a very small way at first, but it grew and grew until it became very important and a source of great riches, as wealth was then estimated, to England. This was when the carrying of the wool over-Channel, to the Continent, had been arranged for, and there was a regular trade going on. That, however, was not to happen until the days when the Normans were rulers of England and could keep their own kinsmen, the Scandinavian rovers, from piracy in the narrow sea straits.

At the point of time to which we have now brought down our story, say 800, when Charlemagne was anointed Emperor by the Pope in Rome, the Danes, from Denmark and perhaps from Norway and Sweden too, were constantly vexing and harrying all the eastern and southern coasts of England and the opposite coasts of the Continent. Their way was to sail up the rivers with their ships, to take everything which they could easily carry away, to work havoc of every kind, by fire and sword—then back to their ships and away again.

At this time you will note that the bigger towns were all in the river valleys, as we have seen already, and also that most of them were not very far inland. In Britain the Romans had fixed their capital city in the north, at York, but after they went away the important part of England was the south. It was the part near the Continent, where all civilisation and religion and good things came from—also, where the conquerors of England were apt to come from. The narrowest sea between the two was what we now call the Straits of Dover. All these circumstances led to the establishment or to the growth of Canterbury as one of the great cities of England.

I write of England as of one country, but you will remember that it still was a disunited, a divided England. It remained so disunited, and vexed by constant wars between the rival kingdoms, until brought under one rule in 827, by the power and wisdom of the great King Egbert, who had come to the throne of Wessex in A.D. 800, the very year of Charlemagne's consecration at Rome, and held authority over all England from 827 till his death in 836. I write this vague and indefinite phrase "held authority" on purpose, because it certainly was not a very definite rule that he held over the whole country, and it must have differed in different parts. He even conquered Wales and all the Celtic part of Britain except Cumbria—our modern Cumberland. It was towards the end of his reign that his more or less united kingdom began to be seriously harassed by the Danish sea-rovers attacking the eastern and southern coasts.

The sites of the cities

We have noticed already that the principal towns grew naturally on the banks of the rivers. There is a further fact about their situation which we may observe, and that is that the chief and largest of them were placed just so far up the rivers that they might get best advantage from the tide. In days long before steam was used to drive ships, and when they could sail only with the wind very much in their favour, you can easily understand how valuable the help of the tide would be, both for coming up and going down a river.

Then, if the town were placed just above the point up to which the saltish sea-water came, the fresh water coming down could be used for drinking and for such processes as brewing and tanning hides which were very early industries; and there would be a constant flow of water to work the corn-grinding mills. Considerations of that kind probably influenced the Anglo-Saxons in choosing sites for their towns such as Canterbury, and Winchester, and London, which became the capital after the Norman conquest. From the Continent people could cross the Straits of Dover and find themselves very soon in the sheltered waters of the Thames estuary or of the Stour which went past Canterbury. The land about the mouth of the Stour has risen a good deal since those days, and the passage of ships up the river was more open and wide then than it is now.

The advantage of Winchester, as a site for a large town, was that from the mouth of the Seine, which came down past Rouen, a very short sea-passage would bring the mariner into the sheltered water behind the Isle of Wight. He could enter that shelter from the east or from the west, as the wind served best, and he would be out of sight of land, either French land or English land, for only a very short distance in the mid-crossing. This was a matter of much importance to the sailors of those days; they did not at all like to go out of sight of their landmarks. Then, once in the Solent, as we call it, the shipman would take advantage of the tide to carry him up Southampton Water, and very likely some way up the Itchen river, towards Winchester, before he need run his ship aground and disembark.

As a further advantage you may see that both Canterbury and Winchester had high ground close about them on which a fortified camp could be made for the protection of the town. And we know, in fact, that such camps were made in the vicinity of both towns. The ground bears signs of them to this day. The beginnings of London are thought to have been a British hill fort on the hill where St. Paul's Cathedral now stands. Of other cities we know that Manchester was a British settlement and a place where the Druids worshipped, and later a Roman city. We hear of Birmingham as a village of the Saxon Beormingas. Liverpool was a fishing village in Saxon times, but not of sufficient importance to be named in Domesday Book.

This brief account may, I hope, give you some little idea of the manner in which those people lived, and so laid the foundations of our life to-day. They were without a great many things which we look on as absolute necessities. They had, at first, no cotton and no linen for their clothes. They had no tea or coffee to drink; no tobacco to smoke. They had beer, which they brewed and sometimes sweetened with honey, for they understood bee-keeping. The honey was important for them, for they had no sugar. Neither had they potatoes; and they grew no root crops for their cattle to eat in winter.

That fact that they had no root crops was important in their lives, for it meant that all they had to keep their cattle and sheep alive on in the winter was such hay as they could make and store. It would not support a very large stock all through the winter, and the consequence was that they killed down all their stock, except what was wanted for breeding purposes, at the beginning of each winter.

Now you may remember I said that one of the chief necessities that the villagers would have to buy, because they could not produce it for themselves, was salt. Seeing how many of what we call necessities, such as sugar and the like, they could do without, you may wonder that salt should be so necessary. But now that you know about this killing off of so much of the stock at the beginning of winter you may begin to see the necessity of the salt. Unless all this good food was to go bad it must be salted, in order to preserve it for eating as required. So, in the winter months, they might have meat sometimes; but it would be salted meat, not fresh.

Importance of hunting

But of course that would not apply to any game that they might kill by hunting in "the waste"—the woodland—nor does it appear that freemen were forbidden, in Anglo-Saxon times, to hunt. They had bows, which they made of yew or other wood, and spear shafts and arrows of ash, and the English very early were famous for their archery. They were famous too for their breed of hunting dogs, which were sometimes exported to the Continent, so highly were they valued.