CHAP. V. Elfred. 901 937. barter; and the assessment of the "wer" throughout 1 The House of Æthelberht's law in coin shows that specie-payment was common there a century before Ine's day. It was not however till Offa's reign that the growing commerce, as well, no doubt, as the growth of internal trade, forced the regulation of the coinage on the English kings as a political matter; and it is significant that Offa drew his standard of value from the coinage of the Frankish kings. But the union of the kingdoms had now made the substitution of a national coinage for these local mintages a necessity. "Let there be one money over all the king's land," ran the new law; "and let no man mint save within port." The list of towns where mints were established gives us a rough indication of the comparative greatness of the boroughs in southern Britain. stood at their head with eight moneyers, Canterbury followed with seven, Winchester with six, Rochester had three coiners, Lewes, Southampton, Wareham, Exeter, and Shaftesbury two, Hastings, Chichester, and "other burhs" but one.2 Frith-gilds London The real difficulty however lay not in making, but in enforcing the law; for strong as the crown might be its strength lay in the king's personal action, and it was far from possessing any adequate police or judicial machinery for carrying its will into effect. To supply such a machinery was the aim of the frithgilds. Society and justice, as we have seen, had till now rested on the basis of the family, on the kinsfolk bound together in ties of mutual responsibility to 1 See Robertson, "Histor. Essays," p. 63. 2 Thorpe, "Anc. Laws," i. 207, 209. CHAP. V. Elfred. 901 937. each other and to the law. As society became more complex and less stationary, it necessarily outgrew The House of these ties of blood, and in England this dissolution of the family bond seems to have taken place at the very time when Danish incursions and the growth of a feudal temper among the nobles rendered an isolated existence most perilous for the freeman. His only resource was to seek protection among his fellowfreemen, and to replace the older brotherhood of the kinsfolk by a voluntary association of his neighbours for the same purposes of order and self-defence. The tendency to unite in such "frith-gilds" or peaceclubs became general throughout Europe during the ninth and tenth centuries, but on the Continent it was roughly met and repressed. The successors of Charles the Great enacted penalties of scourging, nose-slitting, and banishment against voluntary unions, and even a league of the poor peasants of Gaul against the inroads of the northmen was suppressed by the swords of the Frankish nobles. In England the attitude of the kings was utterly different. The system known at a later time as frank-pledge," or free engagement of neighbour for neighbour, was accepted after the Danish wars as the base of social order. Alfred recognized the common responsibility of the members of the "frith-gild" side by side with that of the kinsfolk, and Æthelstan accepted "frith-gilds" as a constituent element of borough life in the dooms of London.1 In the frithgild an oath of mutual fidelity among its members 1 1 Thorpe, "Anc. Laws," vol. i. Ine, pp. 113, 117; Ælfred, pp. 79, 81; Æthelstan, pp. 229, 237. СНАР. У. Elfred. 901937. was substituted for the tie of blood, while the gildThe House of feast, held once a month in the common-hall, replaced the gathering of the kinsfolk round their familyhearth. But within this new family the aim of the gild was to establish a mutual responsibility as close as that of the old. "Let all share the same lot," ran its law; "if any misdo, let all bear it." A member could look for aid from his gild-brothers in atoning for any guilt incurred by mishap; he could call on them for assistance in case of violence or wrong; if falsely accused they appeared in court as his compurgators ; if poor they supported, and when dead, they buried him. On the other hand he was responsible to them as they were to the state for order and obedience to the laws. A wrong of brother against brother was a wrong against the general body of the gild, and was punished by fine, or in the last resort by expulsion, which left the offender a "lawless" man and an outcast. The one difference between these gilds in country and town was that in the latter case, from their close local neighbourhood, they tended inevitably to coalesce. Imperfect as their union might be, when once it was effected, the town passed from a mere collection of brotherhoods into an organized community, whose character was inevitably determined by the circumstances of its origin. The shire. While the frith-gild was thus supplying one at least of the elements of a new municipal life within English boroughs, a new organization of the country at large was going on in the institution of the shire. In the earlier use of the word, "shire" had simply answered to "division." The town of York was parted CHAP. V. Elfred. 901937. into seven such shires. There were six "small shires in Cornwall. The old kingdom of Deira has left The House of indications of its divisions in our Richmondshire, Kirbyshire, Riponshire, Hallamshire, Islandshire, and Norhamshire; just as their lathes and rapes represent perhaps the old shires of the kingdoms of Kent and of Surrey. The name was used even for ecclesiastical divisions of territory; a diocese is a "bishop's shire;"1 a parish is a "kirk shire." But in its later form of a territorial division for purely administrative purposes, the shire was in fact the creation of an artificial "folk." Its judicial and administrative forms were all those of the "folk" transferred within artificial boundaries, and the representative life of folk-moot and hundredmoot was thus preserved in the shire, with all its incalculable consequences in later English history. The shire, so far as we can we can see historically, is specially a West-Saxon institution. The first traces of it indeed may probably be found in the earliest ages of West-Saxon history. The original Wessex was, as we have seen, the region of the Gwent, and the earliest portion of West-Saxon conquest within that area was the region we call Hampshire. For this region we possess no earlier name, and in the name itself we find traces of a very early date, for Hampshire is but an abridged Hamtonshire, the district that found its centre in the tun that is now represented by our Southampton. Had the formation of 1 That of Ealdhelm is styled "Selwoodshire." Ethelweard, a. 709. On the other hand, we may note that Bæda knows only of " dioceses" in Wessex, as he knows only "regiones" in Mercia. The West-Saxon shires. CHAP. Y. this district taken place after the revival of WinThe House of chester and the settlement of the West-Saxon kings Elfred. 901 937. and bishops there in the time of Cenwalch,' the district would naturally have taken such a name as Winchestershire, like our Leicestershire or Gloucestershire; but its name of Hamtonshire points necessarily to an earlier date than this, and one which cannot be later than the first half of the seventh century. The name however has more to tell us. A shire is necessarily a district "shorn" off from some neighbour district; and the artificial character of such a "shearing" between Hampshire and Wiltshire is shown in the absence of any distinctly marked local divisions in the bounds between the two shires, while a close connexion between the two districts is shown in the similarity of their naming. Not only does Hampshire draw its name from the "tun" of the first Gewissas at Hamton, but the "t" in our Wiltshire shows that the word is only a contracted form of Wiltonshire, or the shire that found its "tun" in our Wilton, the settlement made by the Gewissas in the valley of the little Wil or Wiley. It is possible that each tun may have been a gatheringplace of its shire-folk for moots and sacrifices; but however this may have been, we cannot fail to see in the relations of the two an indication, not only of the very early existence of the shire institution amongst the West-Saxons, but of the formation of the shire in its earliest shape round a central "tun." The West-Saxon origin of the "shire" is confirmed of the shire. by the fact that its name first occurs in the laws of 1 Cenwalch reigned from 643 to 672 (A.SG.). Extension |