enough to search through the loose memorials of an age of comparative barbarity, for the standard of our present policy.

The ancient Germans, and indeed all the northern nations that were instrumental in overturning the old fabric of Roman despotism, brought with them a constitution, if such it could be called, in which the character of the people, as fierce as it was free, was vigorously expressed. The rights of humanity were recognised in the outlines of these military establishments, and the characters of freedom and independence, have never been wholly obliterated in any of the European governments. The real state of the Anglo-Saxon establishments rests in great obscurity; an obscurity greatly increased by the studied misrepresentations of controversy. According to appearances it was subject to frequent vacillation, and varied essentially in the different kingdoms of the heptarchy. That the power of the monarch was subject to great limitations, there is abundance of proof in the events of those times, but that it was limited more by custom than settled law is inferible from its fluctuations and inconsistencies;-on some occasions despotically overbearing, on others obsequious to the will of the aristocracy. A similar mutability is displayed in the condition of every class of the community in those desultory times, which disclose a general view of affairs in which power, but little defined or coerced by positive law, was left to run into the vagrant channels of property and personal ability.

It is probable that circumstances were more favourable to liberty among the Anglo-Saxons than the other invading nations of the north. They appear to have been the rudest and poorest of the Germans; and the advancement of their conquest over the natives was so slow and difficult, that the accumulations of property and individual aggrandizement were somewhat delayed in their progress, and a larger measure of their ancient privileges were preserved to the conquered. Besides which, the smallness of the original allotments in the allodial distribution of lands, would be likely to occasion an earlier combination of petty proprietors into confederacies for mutual protection; and to these rude associations of free men, we trace with probability, the origin of towns, vills, and burghs. These confederácies were, doubtless, in their incipient state, rather martial than civil; and nothing probably was remoter from their first contemplations than the acquisition of the immunities and privileges, to which subsequent events and opportunities opened the way. The division of vills into decennaries, and the formation of those again into larger districts, as hundreds and counties, with their respective courts for the distribution of justice, were alone sufficient to

prevent the sense of freedom from being lost in the inequalities of condition. The date of the origin of juries has never been fixed with any certainty, but as the method of deciding causes by a plurality of voices would soon be found extremely inconvenient, it is not improbable that the adoption of a select number for the dispatch of justice, was an innovation of very remote antiquity.

Thus in a very early period of our history, there are undoubted vestiges of political liberty. It is abundantly proved by the bare existence of these political arrangements upon so popular and equitable a plan. As the freeholders were fined for non-attendance at these courts, and as a variety of civil transactions both of a public and private nature were there attested, ratified, and promulged, the attendance would naturally be great, and the fermentation of mind with mind the inevitable consequence. The constitution of these assemblies, therefore, it must be owned, were well adapted to mitigate the ferocities of the times, and to cherish the seeds of liberty; nor could a people, capable of comprehending the value of such privileges, and of struggling for their preservation, be said to be in a condition of political degradation. The question respecting the powers and constitution of the Wittenagemot has been incessantly agitated, not as a mere question of curiosity, as it really ought, but as a point materially affecting our title to the constitution we enjoy, and as the standard to which it is to be recalled from its deviations. The controversy was at its height soon after the accession of the Stuarts. Monarchical zealots were anxious to prove that this council was a vassal appendage to the crown, summoned only for advice, or taxation, with a nominal independence, but in truth and fact under the king's immediate influence and controul. The favourers of popular ascendancy have gone into as wide an extreme. They have ascribed to it the supreme direction of affairs, and clothed it with the character of a pure representative body; the organ at once of the nobility, the priesthood, the yeomanry, the merchants, and the manufacturers. These propositions equally violent, and probably at equal distances from the truth, have been respectively supported with more zeal than knowledge. Each party has endeavoured to establish its point by a garbled selection of incidents, affording, as is commonly the case in unsettled times, contradictory inferences; and by straining the interpretation of vague and general terms used by ancient writers, who, not anticipating these disputes, were little circumspect in their language; while both have overlooked the plain conclusions from those undisputed facts, which hold up to view the actual situation of the country.

That none had seats in this assembly, at least during the greater part of the time of its continuance, but persons having a free property in land of a certain extent, is pretty plainly indicated by the testimonies which have come down to us; and this supposition agrees with the general descriptive appellation given to the constituent members, who are usually designated as the bishops and abbots, together with the aldermen, chiefs, and nobles, terms unadapted to any but the persons then called the Greater Thanes, or landed proprietors with full allodial property. This, at least for a great length of time, may be most rationally supposed to have been the case; and as in the early times of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, these allodial proprietors of land were probably very numerous, it may be inferred, that the constitution of Wittenagemot admitted a pretty considerable portion of the people; though it cannot be supposed that the less wealthy members, in times when possessions gave so much rank and importance, could have enjoyed any great political weight in a council so composed. It is yet more improbable that the manufacturing and trading part of the community formed any part of it. Before this can be rationally supposed, we must imagine them assembled in towns, and invested with corporate capacity, and collective privileges.

It must be admitted that mention is made (though by writers posterior to the conquest) of the people, as being part of this general council. But when the latitude and ambiguity of this term, as politically applied, is recollected, it will appear absurd to lay much stress upon it. If it is to be taken in the vulgar sense, must include the whole body of the nation, unless we assume the fact of a representative system, which no where appears in terms, and which is opposed by every fair inference from analogy, when the state of the country is properly taken into view. Who can suppose that when Canute, in the fifth year of his reign, is said to have held a great council of his archbishops, dukes, earls, and abbots, "cum quamplurimis gregariis militibus, ac cum populi multitudine copiosâ," that the persons comprehended under the latter part of this description, were admitted to share in the deliberations or resolves of this great national assembly, or were present at it in any other character than that of mere spectators. In frequent instances we find the word people used as a correlative to the clerical order, as in a record of a Wittenagemot, held in the time of King Ethelbert, where the words are" convocato igitur communi concilio tam cleri quam populi," a circumstance indicating in a striking manner, the numbers and importance of the ecclesiastics in that day. To extend the term "wites," or "wise men," to the common people, at a time

any

when commerce and the arts had scarcely begun their progress, is an expansion of courtesy which we candidly confess we do not feel, and to which we are so uncharitable as to think that neither truth nor probity can condescend. That the real importance and efficiency of the Saxon Wittenagemot, during the greater part of this period of our history, was considerable, is a point universally admitted. Hume holds it to be quite clear, that its sanction was material in the enactment of laws, and for ratifying the public acts of administration. Other authors of weight and research, have considered the power of making peace and war as an indisputable part of its great office; from which it seems to result, in the opinion of the author of the historical view of the English government, that the members were all allodial proprietors of land; since, if they had been vassals of the crown, they would have been bound by their tenures to have attended the king in his wars, and consequently that their consent could not have been requisite to any military undertaking.

As the kingly office was ill defined, and varying in its pretensions and practice, according to the varying postures of the kingdom, something of a similar vacillation is, with reason, attributable to the other departments and classes of the political system. Without doubt, the competence of this council was varied in extent in the different states of the heptarchy, and after the consolidation of the empire under a single potentate, was continued down to the era of the conquest, declining in authority in proportion as the accumulations of property created an aristocracy above the controul of the law.

Upon the whole, although the laws of Ethelbert, Ina, Alfred, Edward the Elder, Athelstan, Edmund, Edgar, Ethelred, Edward the Confessor, and even of Canute himself, carry undoubted evidence of a limited and legal government; yet even in the best times of this obscure period, the science of legislation seems to have been so rude and undigested, so ineffectual a rampart was raised against civil disturbances, and private wrongs; and there prevailed so many tyrannical distinctions destructive of that natural equality which must be the acknowledged basis of every legitimate system of polity, that when the firm and temperate government under which we live, is traduced by a lying comparison with a state of things so far behind us in whatever appertains to the felicity of man, or the perfection of his nature, honesty, gratitude, and common sense, are all equally outraged.

According to the very sensible author of the "Historical Reflections," whose work stands first at the head of this article,

and whom we have much pleasure in introducing to our readers, as a very candid, rational, and accurate writer on the subject he has undertaken to elucidate, "whatever might be the political arrangement of society previous to the conquest, it was then established on a foundation in a great measure new." It was then that the feudal system, to which the state of the country had been fast tending for some time before this event, was thoroughly established; accompanied by that technical distribution of society, and peculiar cast of sentiments and manners, which have produced so extraordinary a revolution in the character and circumstances of mankind. Very little can now be known of the details of government in the first ages of this new era. The class of historians to which we are driven for information, is above all others dry, deficient, and obscure. There was little, indeed, to encourage or reward their efforts. The minds of men were bent towards objects foreign to political speculations: martial enterprizes, reciprocal dues and claims of service and protection, the decision of private quarrels by the arbitration of the sword, the discharge of superstitious obligations, and the struggles between civil and ecclesiastical authority, engrossed the time and thoughts of men so entirely, as, for a long time, to hide from their contemplation, and even from their curiosity, the genuine forms of liberty and protecting justice. The want of all historical exposition of the maxims of government, and the methods of legislation, in the times to which we are now alluding, is, however, somewhat supplied by the knowledge we are furnished with of events and practices which afford indubitable inferences of the weakness of the laws, and the unsettled limitations of power: and upon the whole, one thing is most clear,-that if a representative system of legislation had really existed in the times preceding the reign of Henry the Third, so marked a feature would have left no necessity for proving its existence by conjectures founded upon dubious expressions, and bits and scraps of testimony threaded inconsequentially together, with a contemptuous disregard of their true bearings, and the general tone of the context. Mr. Jopp very pertinently urges upon the modern sectaries of reform, who refer us to these early periods for the true model of our free constitution, the propriety, in the absence of all direct evidence, of shewing the fitness of the people for their supposed representative privileges, and that their habits and political condition was such as to back the hypothesis with some probable inferences from collateral facts. These facts are, however, so wanting to the argument, that the very sensible and well-informed writer of the "Observations on the ancient Statutes"