The History of England | Page 5

to attend the court in which
the lord or his steward exercised jurisdiction.
This growth of private jurisdiction was another sign of the times.
Justice had once been administered in the popular moots, though from
very early times there had been social distinctions. Each village had its
"best" men, generally four in number, who attended the moots of the
larger districts called the Hundreds; and the "best" were probably those
who had inherited or acquired the best homesteads. This aristocracy
sometimes shrank to one, and the magnate, to whom the poor
surrendered their land in return for protection, often acquired also rights
of jurisdiction, receiving the fines and forfeits imposed for breaches of
the law. He was made responsible, too, for the conduct of his poorer
neighbours. Originally the family had been made to answer for the
offences of its members; but the tie of blood-relationship weakened as
the bond of neighbourhood grew stronger with attachment to the soil;
and instead of the natural unit of the family, an artificial unit was
created for the purpose of responsibility to the law by associating
neighbours together in groups of ten, called peace-pledges or
frith-borhs. It is at least possible that the "Hundred" was a further
association of ten frith-borhs as a higher and more responsible unit for

the administration of justice. But the landless man was worthless as a
member of a frith-borh, for the law had little hold over a man who had
no land to forfeit and no fixed habitation. So the landless man was
compelled by law to submit to a lord, who was held responsible for the
behaviour of all his "men"; his estate became, so to speak, a private
frith-borh, consisting of dependents instead of the freemen of the public
frith-borhs. These two systems, with many variations, existed side by
side; but there was a general tendency for the freemen to get fewer and
for the lords to grow more powerful.
This growth of over-mighty subjects was due to the fact that a
government which could not protect the poorest could not restrain the
local magnates to whom the poor were forced to turn; and the weakness
of the government was due ultimately to the lack of political education
and of material resources. The mass of Englishmen were locally
minded; there was nothing to suggest national unity to their
imagination. They could not read, they had no maps, nor pictures of
crowned sovereigns, not even a flag to wave; none, indeed, of those
symbols which bring home to the peasant or artisan a consciousness
that he belongs to a national entity. Their interests centred round the
village green; the "best" men travelled further afield to the hundred and
shire-moot, but anything beyond these limits was distant and unreal, the
affair of an outside world with which they had no concern.
Anglo-Saxon patriotism never transcended provincial boundaries.
The government, on the other hand, possessed no proper roads, no
regular means of communication, none of those nerves which enable it
to feel what goes on in distant parts. The king, indeed, was beginning to
supply the deficiencies of local and popular organization: a special
royal peace or protection, which meant specially severe penalties to the
offender, was being thrown over special places like highways, markets,
boroughs, and churches; over special times like Sundays, holy days,
and the meeting-days of moots; and over special persons like priests
and royal officials. The church, too, strove to set an example of
centralized administration; but its organization was still monastic rather
than parochial and episcopal, and even Dunstan failed to cleanse it of
sloth and simony. With no regular system of taxation, little government

machinery, and no police, standing army, or royal judges, it was
impossible to enforce royal protection adequately, or to check the
centrifugal tendency of England to break up into its component parts.
The monarchy was a man rather than a machine; a vigorous ruler could
make some impression, but whenever the crown passed to a feeble king,
the reign of anarchy recommenced.
Alfred's successors annexed the Danelaw which Alfred had left to
Guthrum, but their efforts to assimilate the Danes provoked in the first
place a reaction against West Saxon influence which threatened more
than once to separate England north of the Thames from Wessex, and,
secondly, a determination on the part of Danes across the sea to save
their fellow-countrymen in England from absorption. Other causes no
doubt assisted to bring about a renewal of Danish invasion; but the
Danes who came at the end of the tenth century, if they began as
haphazard bands of rovers, greedy of spoil and ransom, developed into
the emissaries of an organized government bent on political conquest.
Ethelred, who had to suffer from evils that were incurable as well as for
his