CHAP. I. burial-grounds represented the growing demands of The popular religion. From Bæda's letter to Archbishop Ecgberht. Ecgberht we see that the establishment of manorial

England of

The parish and the township.

churches, that is, of what we commonly mean by a parochial system, was still far from complete, at least in Northumbria, in the middle of the eighth century; but in the half century that followed, it had probably extended itself fairly over the land. An attempt was also made to provide a settled livelihood for the parish priests in the " tithe " or payment of a tenth of the farm-produce by their parishioners ; but the obligation to pay this was still only imperfectly recognized, and the repeated injunctions of kings and synods from Ethelstan downwards witness, by their repetition, to the general disobedience. It is probable that the priest as yet relied far more for his subsistence on his dues, on the "plough-alms after Easter, the "church-shot" at Martinmas, and "light-shot" thrice in the year, as well as the "soulshot" that was paid at the open grave.

Nothing is more remarkable in this extension of the ecclesiastical system than the changes wrought by it in the original unit of English social life. The stages by which the township passed into its modern form of the parish, and by which almost every trace of its civil life successively disappeared, are obscure and hard to follow, but the change began with the first entry of the Christian priest into the township.2 The

1 "A tithe of young by Pentecost, and of earth-fruits by All Hallows mass," Laws of Ethelred. Thorpe, "Anc. Laws," i. 319. See Laws of Eadward and Guthrum, ib. P. 171.

2 Stubbs, "Const. Hist." i. 96, 104, 260.

CHAP. I.

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village church seems often to have been built on the very mound that had served till then for the gatherings of the tunsfolk. It is through this that we so often Ecgberht. find in later days the tun-moot held in the churchyard or ground about the church, and the common practice even now of the farmers gathering for conference outside the church porch before morning service may preserve a memory of this freer openair life of the moot before it became merged in the parish vestry. The church thus became the centre of village-life; it was at the church-door as in the moot, that "banns" were proclaimed, marriages or bargains made; even the "fair," or market, was held in the church-yard, and the village-feast, an institution no doubt of immemorial antiquity, was held on the day of the saint to which the church was dedicated; while the priest himself, as its custodian, displaced more and more the tun-reeve or elder. It was he who preserved the weights and measures of the little community,1 who headed the "beating" of its bounds, who administered its oaths and ordeals,2 who led its four chosen men to hundred-moot or folk-moot, and sometimes even to the field. The revolution which was transforming the free township into the manor of a lord aided in giving the priest a public position. Though the lord's court came to absorb the bulk of the work of the older tun-moot, the regulation and apportionment of the land, the enforcement of by-laws, the business of its police, yet the tun-moot retained the little that grant or

1 Lingard, "Anglo-Saxon Church," i. 171.

2 Ibid. ii. 132 et seq.

CHAP. I.

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custom had not stripped from it; and it is thus that, in its election of village officers, of churchwarden and Eegberht waywarden, as well as in its exercise of the right of taxation within the township for the support of church and poor, we are enabled to recognize in the parish vestry with the priest at its head the survival of the village-moot which had been the nucleus of our early life. 1

Pilgrimages.

Without, the new faith brought England for the first time, as we have seen, into religious contact with the western world through the mission-work of Boniface and his followers in Germany, and into political contact with it through the relations which this mission work established with the Empire of the Franks. But a social contact of a far closer and more national kind was brought about by the growth of pilgrimages. At the time which we have reached, pilgrimages were among the leading features of English life. The spell which the mere name of Rome had thrown over Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop had only wrought the more widely as years went on. From churchman it passed to layman, and the enthusiasm reached its height when English kings laid down their crowns to become suppliants at the shrine of the apostles. Fresh from his slaughter of the Jutes in the Isle of Wight, the West-Saxon Ceadwalla "went to Rome, being desirous to obtain the peculiar honour of being washed in the font of baptism within the church of the blessed apostles, for he had learned that in baptism alone the entrance of heaven is opened to mankind, and he hoped that 1 Stubbs, "Const. Hist." i. 104.

CHAP. I.

The

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laying down his flesh as soon as he was baptized, he being cleansed, should immediately pass to the eternal joys of heaven. Both which things came to Ecgberht. pass as he had conceived them in his mind. For coming to Rome," in 689, "he was baptized on the holy Saturday before Easter Day, and being still in his white garment he fell sick, was freed from the flesh," on the 20th of April, "and was associated with the blessed in heaven."1 Twenty years later a king of the Mercians and a king of the East Saxons quitted their thrones to take the tonsure at Rome,2 and in 725 even Ine of Wessex gave up the strife with the anarchy about him, and made his way to die amidst the sacred memories of the holy city.

" 3

The pilgrimages of the kings gave a new energy to the movement, and from this time the pilgrims' way was thronged by groups of English folk, "noble and ceorl, layman and clerk, men and women.' The dangers and hardships of the journey failed to deter them. The road which the pilgrims followed was mainly the same by which English travellers now-adays reach Italy; they landed at Quentavic near Boulogne, which was then the chief port of the northern coast of Gaul, and crossing the high grounds of Burgundy at Langres journeyed along the Saone valley and Savoy to the passes of Mount Cenis. It was in these Alpine districts that the

1 Bæd. H. E. lib. v. c. 7.

2 Ibid. lib. v. c. 19.

4

3 Bæd. H. E. lib. v. c. 7, "Quod his temporibus plures de gente Anglorum, nobiles, ignobiles, laici, clerici, viri et feminæ, certatim facere, consuerunt."

4 Bæda, "Lives of Abbots of Wearmouth," sec. 21.

C

Their

dangers.

CHAP. I.

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1

troubles of the pilgrims reached their height; for The if an Archbishop of Canterbury could be frozen Kegberht to death in traversing them we may conjecture how severe must have been the sufferings of poorer travellers; but to the natural hardships of the journey was added the hostility of their fellow-men. To the robber lords of the mountain valleys pilgrims were a natural prey. It was in vain that Offa and Cnut alike sought protection for their subjects from Charles the Great and the Emperor Conrad. Imperial edicts told little on the greed of these hungry mountain wolves; an archbishop was plundered in Cnut's own day; and soon after the marauders were lucky enough to pillage three bishops as well.2 It was in vain that the wayfarers gathered into companies for mutual protection; 3 for the country with its defiles and precipices was itself on the side of their assailants, and in the opening of the tenth century we hear of the surprise and slaughter of two bodies of English pilgrims in the mountains.

Their

But neither the dangers of the journey nor the popularity. fever that awaited them at its close checked the rush of pilgrims. The increase in number indeed had been accompanied by a falling off in the character of the travellers. In some cases the exemption from port-dues which was granted to pilgrims seems to

1 Will. Malm. "Gest. Pontif." (Opera, ed. Migne, col. 1453). 2 Angl. Sacr. ii. 129.

3 We find eighty Englishmen in the train of Abbot Ceolfrid of Wearmouth. Bæda, "Lives of Abbots of Wearmouth," sec. 21.

4 " Magna febris fatigatio advenas illic venientes visitare seu gravare solet." Life of St. Winibald, ap. Canis. p. 126, quoted by Lingard, "Anglo-Saxon Church," ii. 127.