five hides of land to send an armed man to war and supply his expenses. The second was the unsettled condition of the times, which furnished so little security to the small land holder, that he was forced to seek the protection and become the vassal of some one of his more powerful neighbors. A landholder, however, who became a vassal in this fashion, would occupy a far more advantageous position than in the case of one under the Norman feudal system. In both cases the vassal swore allegiance and the lord promised protection; but in the one case the vassal brought the land to the lord, while in the other the lord gave it to the vassal. In Normandy the feudal system existed at the beginning and was the foundation; in England it was introduced after the existence of the private ownership of land, and after the development of a system of real estate law. The result was that in Normandy the law governing the land was created to harmonize with the feudal system, and was in fact an integral part of it. With the Anglo-Saxons, feudalism was modified by the force of the existing law of real property. The Norman law was naturally much better adapted for the high development of the feudal system; we find there the rule of primogeniture, and the rigid restriction on alienation, which were absent among the Anglo-Saxons. The whole tendency of the age was towards the strengthening of the feudal system, and it is possilbe that the Anglo-Saxons might themselves have drawn nearer to the feudalism of the continent, even if they had not been conquered a century later by the most highly feudalized nation in Europe.

The desire of Dunstan to form a single strong nation out of the various tribes and races in England caused him to seek to increase the power of the king at the expense of the nobles. His success in this direction, while it went far to make one England out of the old seven kingdoms, secured for him the enmity of the greater nobles. Once in the early part of his career, during the reign of Eadwig, he was driven from the country, only to return upon the accession of Eadgar, stronger than ever. The murder of Eadward and the accession of Eathelred in 978, however, gave the control of the government

to his opponents, and in the end forced the retirement of Dunstan.

§ 19. The Danish conquest.-Of the four conquests of England, the Danish occasioned the least change in the character of the inhabitants of England, their laws and institutions or in the course of English history. "When the wild burst of the storm was over, land, people, government reappeared unchanged. England still remained England; the conquerors sank quietly into the mass of those around them and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ. The secret of this difference between the two invasions (i. e., the Anglo-Saxon and the Danish) was that the battle was no longer between men of different races; it was no longer a fight between Briton and German, between Englishman and Welshman. The life of these northern folk was in the main the life of the earlier Englishmen. Their customs, their religion, their social order were the same; they were, in fact, kinsmen bringing back to an England, that had forgotten its origin, the barbaric England of its pirate forefathers. Nowhere over Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the combatants men of our blood and speech. But just for this reason the fusion of the northmen with their foes was nowhere so peaceful and so complete." The force of the first stream of Danish invasion was checked by the statesmanship and military skill of Aelfred, and the result was a division of England rather than a conquest; the second invasion, however, resulted in the complete subjugation of England by the Danes near the beginning of the Eleventh century. The great Danish King, Canute, however, instead of trying to make England Danish, became himself an Englishman. His ambition was to make England the center of a great northern Empire, which in size and power might rank on equal terms with the Holy Roman Empire to the south. His domestic English policy was closely based upon that of Aelfred and Dunstan. He sought to weld Dane and Anglo-Saxon into one nation just as his predecessors had labored to unite Northumbrian, Mercian and West Saxon. A continuation of Canute's policy might have accomplished his designs; but such a result was prevented by the character of his sons,

Green's Short History of the English People.

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and their early and violent deaths were followed by the restoration to the English throne of the old West Saxon royal life. The accession to the throne of Edward the Confessor marks the termination of the period of Scandinavian immigration and influence in England. The history of Norway and Denmark, which for the previous two centuries had been so closely united with that of England, now widely diverged. The dream of Canute of a great northern empire, purely Teutonic not only in blood but in laws and institutions, was to fail of realization. The future foreign relations of England were to be with her neighbors across the English Channel instead of the North Sea, and with the new stream of immigration which was about to pour itself upon England were to come laws and institutions of a different and non-teutonic origin. Roman law, which won its greatest victories on the continent, after Rome itself had fallen, was to influence, although it could not overthrow, the great English Common law system, which was rapidly developing in England. But, although England was again to be conquered by continental invaders, although her private law was to adopt much of the civil law, although Norman Feudalism in all its refinement and high development was to succeed the rudimentary feudalism of the Anglo-Saxon, one thing was to remain practically unaffected. The constitutional law of England was destined to be of indigenous origin and growth, unaffected by the work of Norman conquerors or Roman lawyers.

§ 20. Eadward the Confessor.-Eadward the Confessor, famous in history as the last of the Saxon kings of England, was in reality almost as much the first of the Norman kings. Half Norman in blood, more than half Norman in his inclination, entirely Norman in education, Eadward in every way encouraged Norman immigration and prepared the way for the Norman conquest. The whole reign of Eadward the Confessor was a continual conflict between the influence of the foreign favorites. of the king, on the one hand, against the national English spirit on the other, led and protected by the House of Godwin.

The reign of Eadward the Confessor was likewise one of disintegration and an undoing of the work of consolidation of Eadward, Aelfred, Dunstan and Canute. The kingdom became

divided into the four great earldoms of Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. With the rise of the power of the earls, united England gradually passed away. At this period it was the earls who stood for the English people, while the king had become the mere creature of foreign favorites. But the effect of the growing power of the earls, had it not been checked by a foreign conqueror, would have been to throw England back into the position which she had held during the old rivalry of the seven or of the three kingdoms.

§ 21. The Saxon Witenagemote.-The Saxon kingdom was never an absolute monarchy. The power of the Anglo-Saxon king, whether it be during the period of the many kingdoms, of the seven, of the three, or of the one, was always limited by his Witenagemote or Great Council. Centuries before, while Angle and Saxon were yet living in their continental homes, we see the forerunner of the Witenagemote in the Folkmoot, or assembly of the free men of the tribes. In the pages of Tacitus we read that while the principes disposed of all the ordinary business, matters of great importance were submitted to the General Assembly. In the primitive kingdoms in which the Teutonic system originated, the State Assembly still appears as a Folkmoot showing the will of the whole people in arms. In the structure of the Folkmoot there is no departure from primitive traditions. In the course of time, however, the Folkmoot became the Witenagemote, but they are now no longer the great popular assemblies of an entire nation, but simply aristocratic assemblies, composed only of the great men of the kingdom. It is impossible to determine at exactly what period this change was accomplished; it was undoubtedly a gradual one, nor is it possible to determine with any degree of exactness the composition of the Witenagemote at any given time. Its constituent elements seem to have been in the main, the Eoldormen, the Archbishops and Bishops, the King's officers and some of the lower nobility of Thanes. The attendance upon these assemblies may have been partially regulated, at times, by the number who were able to stand the expenses of the journey; distance and the hardships of travel perhaps did more than the King towards keeping down the attendance at the Witenagemote. The only

relic of its former popular character lay at last in the ring of citizens who surrounded the wise men at Winchester and who shouted their "ayes" and "nays" at the election of the King. The power of the Witenagemote was at all periods of the Saxon history large; it could elect or depose the king; to it belonged the administration of the higher justice; the imposition of taxes; the making of laws; the conclusion of treaties, the control of wars and the disposal of public lands and appointment of court officers and officers of state. Altogether the Witenagemote served a double purpose; that of checking the power of the King and that of uniting the people and preventing any undue usurpation of power by any of the great eorls or eorldermen. The growth of the great earldoms in the reign of Edward the Conqueror lessoned the power of the Witenagemote as well as that of the King.

§ 22. The Norman conquest.-The merits of the contest between William of Normandy and Harold, Earl of Wessex, for the English throne, depended upon the question whether or not the office of King of England was to a certain degree an elective office; whether it was an institution created for the public good and over which the people had reserved to themselves a certain degree of control, or whether the kingship was merely a species of property the accession to which was to be governed by the same laws which determined the succession to an estate in real property. The claim of Harold to the throne rested upon his election by the Saxon Witenagemote; that of William upon his relationship to Edward the Conqueror and that monarch's recognition of him as his heir. The decisive battle of Senlac ended in the death of Harold and at once gave to William the control of a large portion of the country, including London. His later campaigns extended his authority over the rest of the realm. History, in giving to the Duke of Normandy the title of William the Conqueror, accurately described the ground upon which his claim to the throne of England was in reality based; William, however, preferred to consider himself as the rightful King of England by the line of hereditary descent and by the nomination of his predecessors, and to regard his victories, not as those