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CHAP. IV.

Ælfred.

878901.

Elfred's difficulties.

Not only did an appeal lie to him personally from every court, but we find him exercizing this jurisdiction through delegated judges, in whose action we see the first traces of the judicial authority of the Royal Council. "All the law dooms of his land that were given in his absence he used to keenly question, of whatever sort they were, just or unjust; and if he found any wrongdoing in them he would call the judges themselves before him, and either by his own mouth or by some other of his faithful men seek out why they gave doom so unrighteous, whether through ignorance or ill-will, or for love or from hate of any, or for greed of gold." The law was in fact now the king's law: offences against it are offences against the king; and contempt of its courts is contempt of the king.

This new conception of justice received a powerful impulse from the growing inefficiency of the "folk's justice" itself. Ælfred's main work, like that of his successor, was to enforce submission to the justice of hundred-moot and shire-moot alike on noble and ceorl," who were constantly at obstinate variance with one another in the folk-moots before ealdorman and reeve, so that hardly any one of them would grant that to be true doom that had been judged for doom

1 Asser (ed. Wise), p. 70: "Nam omnia pene totius suæ regionis judicia, quæ in absentiâ suâ fiebant, sagaciter investigabat, qualia fierent, justa aut etiam injusta ; aut vero si aliquam in illis judiciis iniquitatem intelligere posset, leniter advocatos illos ipsos judices, aut per se ipsum, aut per alios suos fideles quoslibet, interrogabat," &c.

2 "Ofer-hyrnesse;" first heard of in Ll. Eadw. I. sec. i. (Thorpe," Anc. Laws," i. p. 161), and so dating from Ælfred's day.

2

by the ealdorman and reeves."! But even the doom
of the folk-moot was subject on appeal to the justice
of the king. Judicial business, in fact, occupied a
large part of Ælfred's time. He was busied, says his
biographer, "day and night" in the correction of
local injustice, "for in that whole kingdom the
poor had no helpers, or few, save the king himself."
The work was one which brought with it bitter
resistance, and the strife even with men of his own
house for law and justice left pain and disappoint-
ment in Alfred's heart. "Desirest thou power?"
he asks in one of his writings. "But thou shalt
never obtain it without sorrow, sorrow from strange
folk, and yet keener sorrows from thine own kin-
dred." 4
"Hardship and sorrow!" he breaks out
again; "not a king but would wish to be without
these if he could. But I know that he cannot.'
Gloom or anxiety however failed even for a moment
to check his activity in the work of restoration."

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1 Asser (ed. Wise), p. 69. "Nobilium et ignobilium . . qui sæpissime in concionibus comitum et præpositorum pertinacissime inter se dissentiebant, ita ut pene nullus eorum quic. quid a comitibus et præpositis judicatum fuisset, verum esse concederet." As Stubbs ("Const. Hist." i. 112, note) points out, this shows "that ealdorman and gerefa, eorl and ceorl, had their places in these courts," and that, "although the officers might declare the law, the ultimate determination rested in each case with the suitors."

2 Asser (ed. Wise), p. 70.

3 Ibid. p. 69.

4 Ælfred's Boethius, in Sharon Turner's "Hist. Anglo-Sax." vol. ii. p. 43. 5 Ib. p. 45.

6 Later tradition (Will. Malm. "Gest. Reg." (Hardy), i. p. 186) attributed to Ælfred the institution of the shire, the hundred, and the tithing; and Professor Stubbs ("Const. Hist." i. 112) suggests

CHAP. IV.

Ælfred.

878

901.

English
Mercia.

CHAP. IV.

Ælfred. 878901.

He was as busy without Wessex as within. In
the division of Britain at the peace of Wedmore he
had saved from the grasp of the Danes the western
portion of the Mercian kingdom, the upper valleys of
the Thames and the Trent, the whole valley of the
Severn with the outlier of the Hwiccan territory in
Arden, and the more northerly region of our Shrop-
shire and Cheshire. Of what vital importance this
tract was to prove we shall see in the after part of our
story.
It was from it that Ælfred drew the teachers
who began the intellectual and religious restoration of
the rescued realm. It was from it that his daughter
in later days advanced to the conquest of Mid-Britain.
It was of more immediate value as parting the Welsh-
men from the Danes, and thus paving the way for
that complete reduction of the former which was the
necessary prelude to any effective struggle with the
settlers of the Danelaw. But what immediately
fronted the young king was the question of its
government. The question was one of great moment,

a real ground for this. "The West-Saxon shires appear in history under their permanent names, and with a shire organization much earlier than those of Mercia and Northumberland; while Kent, Essex, and East Anglia had throughout an organization derived from their old status as kingdoms. It is in Wessex, further, that the hundredal division is supplemented by that of the tithing. It may then be argued that the whole hundredal system radiates from the West-Saxon kingdom, and that the variations mark the gradual extension of that power as it won its way to supremacy under Egbert or Ethelwulf, or recovered territory from the Danes under Alfred and Edward, Athelstan, Edmund, Edred, and Edgar. If this be allowed, the claim of Alfred, as founder, not of the hundred-law, but of the hundredal divisions, may rest on something firmer than legend."

not only in its bearing on Mercia, but in its bearing on the future of England itself. The royal stocks, once the centres and representatives of the separate folks, were dying out one by one. In the earlier days of Ecgberht the only kings that retained political life were those of Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex, with the tributary realms of East Anglia and of Kent. Of these the Kentish kings soon came to an end, while the strife over the succession in Northumbria sprang from the virtual extinction of its royal stock. But the action of Ecgberht even in the moment of his triumph showed that so long as the royal races existed at all any real union of the English peoples in one political body was practically impossible.

CHAP. IV.
Ælfred.

878-
901.

ealdormanry.

The difficulty indeed could hardly have been The Mercian solved save by some violent shock; and the shock was given by the coming of the Danes. Before fifty years were over the royal houses of Northumbria, of East Anglia, of Mercia, were brought to an end. The two claimants to the northern throne perished in the battle of York. The martyrdom of Eadmund closed the East-Anglian line; while that of Mercia ended in the flight of Burhred to Rome before the inroad of Guthrum. It was thus that the position of Ælfred differed radically from that of Ecgberht; for even had he wished to restore the mere supremacy over Mercia which Ecgberht had wielded, he had no royal house through which to restore it. He was driven in fact by the very force of things to be not merely a West-Saxon over-lord of Mercia, but a Mercian king. He made no attempt to fuse Mercia into Wessex; it remained a separate though dependent

CHAP. IV.

Ælfred.

878901.

state with its Mercian witenagemot and Mercian ruler, Æthelred, who may have sprung from the stock of its older kings. But Ethelred was simply Ealdorman of the Mercians. Though Elfred uses in his dealings with Mercia only the general title of " King," it was as King of the Mercians that he acted; their Ealdorman owned him as his lord, and their Witan met by his licence. How thoroughly Ælfred asserted royal rights in Mid-Britain may be seen indeed from his Mercian coinage. Coinage in the old world was the unquestioned test of kingship, and a mint which Ælfred set up at Oxford' within the borders of the Mercian Ealdormanry proves even more than the submissive words of Witan or Ealdorman the reality of his rule. In fact Wessex and Mercia were now united, as Wessex and Kent had long been united, by their allegiance to the same ruler; and the foundation of a national monarchy was laid in the personal loyalty of Jute and Engle and Saxon alike to the house of Cerdic.2

1 "We have in the British Museum," Mr. Barclay V. Head has been good enough to write to me, "a whole series of Alfred's coins, struck at various mints, and among them are some discovered some twenty or thirty years ago at Cuerdale, which read 'ORSNAFORDA.' It is usual to attribute these to Oxford." On a subsequent personal examination however he finds that the word has been misread, and is clearly "OKSNAFORDA," which must be taken as the earliest authentic form of the town's name. No written evidence for Oxford's existence can be found before its mention in the Chronicle in 912 in the following reign.

2 We find Ethelred an Ealdorman under Burhred, c. 872-4 (Kemb. Cod. Dipl. 304). His first extant charter under Ælfred is of 880, as "dux et patricius gentis Merciorum," and already

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