CHAP. VI. Wessex and the Danelaw. 937 955. guardians of the hoard were bidden to bring their 1 Eadred's death is dated Nov. 23, 955, Eng. Chron. ad ann. NOTE. The two following chapters cannot be considered as expressing Mr. Green's final view of the political state of England, and of the relations of the ealdormen to the Crown, in the tenth century. His work on this period was cut short in the autumn of 1882 by illness and the necessity for leaving England, and these two chapters were hurriedly sketched out, and then laid aside for future reconsideration. In now printing them I wish to state clearly that they are unfinished work which had yet to receive the final examination and judgment of the writer. The materials for Chapter VII. in particular had not been put into any order, and the present arrangement of the subjects is my own. (A. S. G.) CHAPTER VII. THE GREAT EALDORMEN. 955-988. THE true significance of English history during the years that followed the triumph of the house of Elfred over the Danelaw lies in its internal political developement. Foreign affairs are for the time of little import, weighty as their influence had been before, and was again to be. With Eadred's victory the struggle with the Danes seemed to have reached its close. Stray pirate boats still hung off headland and coast; stray wikings still shoved out in spring tide to gather booty. But for nearly half a century to come no pirate fleet landed on the shores of Britain. The storm against which she had battled seemed to have drifted away; and the land passed from the long conflict into a season of external peace. It is in the social and political changes that were passing over the country during this period and the conflicting tendencies which were at work in producing these changes that we must seek for its real history. Here, as elsewhere, the upgrowth of a feudal aristocracy was going on side by side with a vast developement Political condition of England. CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955988. The Monarchy. in the power, and still more in the pretensions of the Crown. The same movement which in other lands was breaking up every nation into a mass of looselyknit states, with nobles at their head who owned little save a nominal allegiance to their king, threatened to break up England itself. What hindered its triumph was the power of the Crown, and it is the story of the struggle of the monarchy with these tendencies to provincial isolation which fills the period between the conquest of the Danelaw and the conquest of England itself by the Norman. It was a struggle which England shared with the rest of the western world, but its issue here was a peculiar one. In other countries feudalism won an easy victory over the central government. England alone the monarchy was strong enough to hold it at bay. But if feudalism proved too weak to conquer the monarchy, it was strong enough to paralyze its action. Neither of the two forces could master, but each could weaken the other, and the conflict of the two could disintegrate England as a whole. From the moment when their rivalry broke into actual strife the country lay a prey to disorder within and to insult from without. In The upgrowth of the kingly power had been brought about, as we have seen, by a number of varied influences. It had drawn new strength from the dying out of the other royal stocks leaving the house of Cerdic alone, and from the high character of the kings of Ælfred's line. A long series of victories, the constant sight and recognition of the king as head of the national host, and the religious character with which the leadership in war against a heathen foe invested him, had added to the royal dignity; and new claims to authority had sprung from the gradual up-building of England, and the extent of dominion brought under the king's rule, from the balance of Danish and anti-Danish parties in the realm, and from the king's position as common political centre of the English provinces. Along with the advance thus brought about in the authority of the Crown, there went on a change in the old Teutonic conception of kingship, and an imitation of Imperial claims aided by intercourse with the Imperial court. The solemn coronation of the king, the oath of fidelity, the identification of loyalty with personal troth to the personal king, the doctrine of treason, the haughty claims to a far-reaching supremacy, the vaunting titles assumed in charters, all point to a new conception of royalty. But the royal claims lay still far ahead of the real strength of the Crown. There was a want of administrative machinery in actual connexion with the government, responsible to it, drawing its force directly from it, and working automatically in its name even in moments when the royal power was itself weak or wavering. The king's power was still a personal power. He had to be everywhere and to see for himself that everything he willed was done. Resting on feeling, on tradition, on personal character, the Crown was strong under a king who was strong, whose personal action was felt everywhere throughout the realm, whose dread lay on every reeve and ealdorman. But with a weak king the Crown was weak. Ealdormen, provincial CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955 988. CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955988. The Ealdormen. witenagemots, local jurisdictions, ceased to move at the royal bidding the moment direct pressure was loosened or removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old provincial jealousies, the old tendency to severance and isolation lingered on, and woke afresh when the Crown fell to a nerveless ruler or to a child. At the moment we have reached the royal power and the national union it embodied had to battle with the impulse given to these tendencies towards national disintegration by the struggle with the northman. We have seen how the spirit of feudalism was aided and furthered by the Danish wars, by the growth of commendation and the decrease of free allodial owners, and by the importance given to the military temper. In the ealdormen themselves the feudal spirit was strengthened by the memories of provincial independence, and by the continued existence of what had once been older kingdoms and diverse peoples, as well as by the retention of their popular life in the survival of their old judicial and administrative forms. Popular feeling and feudal tendencies went in fact hand in hand. The new ealdormen created by the later West-Saxon kings had hardly taken their place as mere lieutenants of the national sovereign before they again began to rise into petty kings, and in the century which follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian thegns following a Mercian or Northumbrian ealdorman to the field, though it were against the lord of the land. Even the constitutional forms which sprang from the old English freedom tended to invest these higher nobles with a commanding power. In the "great meeting" of the |