The England of CHAP. I. bishop, once ranked equal with him in value of life, sank to the level of the ealdorman. The Eogberht, ealdorman himself, in earlier days the hereditary ruler of a smaller state, became a mere delegate of the king. The king, if he was no longer sacred as the son of Woden, became yet more sacred as "the Lord's Anointed." By the very fact of his consecration he was pledged to a religious rule, to justice, mercy and good government; but his "hallowing" invested him also with a power drawn not from the will of man or the assent of his subjects but from the will of God. Treason against him thus became the worst of crimes, while personal service at his court was held not to degrade but to ennoble. The thegns of his household found themselves officers of state; and the developement of politics, the wider extension of home and foreign affairs, gradually transformed these royal servants into a standing council of ministry for the transaction of the ordinary administrative business, and the reception of judicial appeals. The and the thegn. The rise of the royal power was furthered by the theling change which passed at this time over the character of the English noble. Not only was the character of this class profoundly affected by the consolidation of the smaller folks into larger realms, but its whole relation to the king was radically changed. The superiority of the ætheling over the ceorl was a traditional superiority which reached back to the very infancy of the race, and which consisted in an actual difference, as both believed, of blood and origin. The tribal king was simply the noblest among the æthelings. But with the extinction of the smaller king ships, and the subjection of both classes to one of the greater monarchies, the position of the hereditary noble was changed. He was no longer of the same blood with the king; while the wider area of the state, and the number of æthelings it necessarily included within it, lowered his individual position and brought him nearer to the ceorl. At the same time he was being displaced from his older position by nobles of a new and distinct class. Service with the kings, as we have seen, begot the class of thegns; and while the hereditary noble dwindled with the growth of kingship, the noble by service necessarily rose with it. An ætheling of the Middle English inevitably grew less and less important as the Mercian kingdom widened its bounds from sea to sea, while a thegn of the Mercian court grew as inevitably greater. And to the greatness that came of his relation to a greater master the thegn added a corresponding superiority of wealth. The possessions of the village noble might lift him above his fellow villager, but they could not vie with the wide domains which the kings of the great states carved out of the folk-land for their thegns.1 The æthelings thus died down into a social class, while the thegns took their place as a political nobility dependent on the crown. A further developement of the royal power sprang from the changes wrought in the older national institutions by the disappearance of the tribal kingships in the larger monarchies of the Three Kingdoms. 1 These grants had become so frequent, that even by Ine's time, though some gesiths remained landless, this was exceptional. Stubbs, "Const. Hist." i. 181, note 3. CHAP. I. The England of Eegberht. The Witenagemot CHAP. I. The life of the earlier English state was gathered up The in its folk-moot. There through its representatives, Eegberht. chosen in every hundred-moot, the folk expressed and England of exercised its own sovereignty in matters of justice, as of peace and war. But when the folk sank into a portion of a wider state, its folk-moot sank with it; if it still met it was only to exercise one of its older functions, that of supreme justice-court, while political supremacy passed from it to the court of the far-off lord. And as the folk-moot died down into the later shire-moot or county-court the folk's influence on government came to an end. Folk-moots of Surreymen or South Saxons could exercise no control over a king of Wessex. Folk-moots of Hwiccas or North Engle could bring no check to bear on a king of Mercia. Nor was the loss of this influence made up by the control of the nobler class. Beside the folk-moot, and acting with it, had stood the Witenagemot, the group of æthelings gathered to give rede to the king, and through him to propose a course of action to the folk. On these the growth of the monarchies did not tell as directly as on the folk-moot. Nobles could still gather about the king; and while the folk-moot passes out of political notice, the Witenagemot is heard of more and more as a royal council. But if the name remained, the meeting itself became a wholly different one. The decline in the class of æthelings, their displacement by the thegn, would alone have altered its character. The distance of the king from the nobles' homes, as the lesser realms were gathered into the Three Kingdoms, altered it yet more. When a West 1 Stubbs, "Const. Hist." i. 140, 141. The England of Saxon king called his Witan to Exeter he probably CHAP. I. expected few thegns from Sussex or Kent. When he called them to Kent he can hardly have seen Egberht. many from Cornwall or the Defn-sætan. From the opening of the age of consolidation, therefore, the Witenagemot naturally changed into a mere gathering of bishops and great ealdormen, as well as of the royal thegns in service at the court; and it retained this form under the kings of a single England, with just such an increase of numbers as necessarily resulted from the welding of the three realms into one. The seventeen bishops of the English sees, about an equal number of ealdormen, whom we may again presume to be actual rulers of the various folks and under-kingdoms, a few abbots, and some fifty or sixty nobles and thegns, comprised the list at its fullest. But the usual gatherings hardly exceed in number those of Offa's court; and even under later kings, such as Eadgar, the usual Witenagemots number some nine prelates, five ealdormen, and fifteen thegns.2 Such a council might in many ways reflect the national temper, but it was in no sense a representative of the nation. On occasions of peculiar solemnity indeed, such as that of a coronation or the 1 Stubbs, "Const. Hist." i. 146. The Witenagemot that gathered round such a king as Offa consisted only of the five bishops of the Mercian kingdom, of the five or six ealdormen who may have ruled over the older kingdoms or folks that were included within it, and of some ten or a dozen thegns who probably held high offices in the royal household. 2 See for the whole of this subject, Stubbs, "Const. Hist." i. cap. vi. Its character. CHAP. I. promulgation of a code of laws, the old theory of a The folk-moot ratifying the decisions of the Witan and Ecgberht the king rose again into life, and the retinues in England of The Three the train of noble and prelate represented by their shouts of "Aye, aye," the assent of the collective freemen. But such an assent was a mere survival of the past; in practice it was an empty form, and the occasions on which it was called for were rare and exceptional. In ordinary times the Witenagemot was little more than a royal council, whose members were named and summoned by the king, and which widened now and then into aristocratic assemblies that foreshadowed the "Great Council" of the later Baronage. That the movement towards national consolidation Kingdoms. should have stopped so long at the creation of the Three Kingdoms is one of the problems of our early history. But as the eighth century drew to its close, the internal conditions of these states and their relations to one another showed that the long-delayed 1 The decisions of one of Æthelstan's Witenagemots are made in common with "totâ populi generalitate." Cod. Dip. 364. But "that such gatherings shared in any way the constitutional powers of the Witan, that they were organized in any way corresponding to the machinery of the folk-moot, that they had any representative character in the modern sense as having full powers to act on behalf of constituents, that they shared the judicial work, or, except by applause and hooting, influenced the decisions of the chiefs, there is no evidence whatever."-Stubbs, "Const. Hist." i. 142. 2 Æthelstan speaks of the Witan at his great meetings as "Witan whom the king himself has named." Thorpe, "Anc. Laws," i. 241. |