ending of law suits to defend the abbots in their necessities—to supply those prisoners with food, who had no friends nor relations to assist them and to take security in his shire from every one for the due maintenance of the public peace, which if he neglected, he lost his office, and forfeited one hundred and twenty shillings to the king. In addition to this, which appears to have been a general security, he had to take bail in an individual case of a very curious kind. "If," says a law of King Ethelred, "there be any man who is untrue to all the people, let the king's reeve go and bring him under borh"-i. e. surety," that he may be led to justice to those who accused him. But if he have no borh, let him be slain and be laid in the ful,”—that is in the burial ground for felons,-" and if any one stand up for him, let them both be worthy of one law."

It is not easy to say what is precisely intended by the phrase of "being untrue to all the people"; but to judge from the punishment it must mean an offender in the very worst degreemost probably a traitor to his country, a word of wide import, and which might be construed to signify a deserter to a common enemy, or a rebel to the king. To kill a man, and bury him amongst felons, men denied the decent rites of Christian sepulture, seems in any case a hard measure of justice, but the law becomes well nigh atrocious when it ordains that all, who stand up for the criminal, are to share his punishment. It is moreover in total opposition to the general character of the Anglo-Saxon law, which, as we have already seen, punished murder and rape with nothing more severe than a fine proportioned to the rank and profession of the victim.

The Thegns, or thanes, are next to be considered, and, although the subject is not without many difficulties, the following conclusions will brobably be found not very wide of the intended mark. They formed a class of nobles below the eorls and ealdormen, the rank being attainable by all, even by the lowest. The possession of land to the extent of five hides was an indispensable qualification, the Anglo-Saxons attaching a peculiar regard to that kind of property, which indeed was scarcely to be wondered at, when in most cases it had been gained by valour in the field, with them the highest of all human merits, while the wealth acquired by trade and the arts of peace was a matter of very

secondary consideration. But there were other requisites besides. The thegn must have "a church, a bell-house, a judicial at the burgh-gate, and a distinct office or station in the king's hall"; which last might be interpreted either as signifying an office in the king's household, or a seat in the witenagemot. Whoever by his industry and talents could acquire these essentials, no matter what his condition, so he was in the ranks of the freemen, became of right a freeman, and we need not go further for a proof of the almost instinctive sagacity of our Saxon forefathers in the science of government. What Rome in the plenitude of her power and republicanism could never discover, these rude warriors from the forests of Germany found for themselves with a wisdom that may be called intuition. They opened the paths of honour to all, and what greater stimulus to exertion could have been offered? Nor was their wisdom less evident in making the rank, thus obtained, personal instead of hereditary. At least, such in general it appears to be, although the laws twice speak of thegns as having been born in that rank. Perhaps there were some restrictions, of which we no longer see the traces.

These nobles were of two kinds; thegns simply so called and king's thegns. The former, who in time came to be designated, a knight, served as an attendant in the royal hall to the king's thegn, and accompanied him also when he followed the monarch in his military expeditions. The latter was immediately in the service of the sovereign. By Bede he is called the "king's minister"; in after times he received the appellation of baron.

The thegn was also a magistrate, and for wilful errors of judgment might forfeit his thegn-scipe or thaneship, as we learn from the laws of king Edgar-" And let the judge, who judges wrong to another, pay to the king one hundred and twenty shillings as boot, unless he dare to prove on oath that he knew it not more rightly. And let him forfeit for ever his thegn-scipe; unless he will buy it of the king, so as he is willing to allow him, and let the bishop of the shire exact the boot into the king's hands."

We now come to that which must be the termination of all human history-the grave of the Anglo-Saxons, and its attendant

customs.

As it was at one period the custom of the northern nations to burn their dead, it is most probable that the ancient Saxons, a branch of the same great family, had in early days the same habit. We do not, however, find the actual practice of it by the Anglo-Saxons in any part of their recorded history.

Their coffins were made either of wood or stone, the latter material, as the most costly, being used only by kings, and prelates, and the heads of monasteries, or by the nobles and wealthier classes. This distinction is plainly seen in the story of Etheldrid, the daughter of a king, but who in the wildness of female fanaticism chose to lead a maiden life though twice married, and afterwards became abbess of Ely, where by exceeding the usual forms of religious mortification she obtained the character of a saint and a worker of miracles. At her own desire, and to mark her more than Christian humility, she was buried in a wooden coffin; but after she had lain in the grave sixteen years, her sister, who had succeeded to her office, thought it a shame that one so high-born and holy should rest like one of the common people; she therefore caused the body to be dug up, with intent to place it in a stone-coffin, and for greater honour translate it into the church. "And when," says Bede, "the body of the blessed virgin and spouse of Christ was exhumed and brought into the light, it was found to be as fresh as if she had died the same day, and never been buried at all, as bishop Wilfrid, and many others, who knew the fact, have testified. But the physician, Cinfrid, who was present at her death as well as at her exhumation, was accustomed to relate with more minute knowledge that "in her illness she had a great swelling under her jaw which I was ordered to open that the noxious matter might escape. This being done, it seemed for two days she suffered somewhat less, so that many thought she might recover. But on the third day the pains increasing, she was snatched from the world, and exchanged all grief and death itself for perpetual health and life everlasting. When after so many years she was to be disinterred and placed beneath a pavilion, the brethren standing on one side, and the sisters on the other, with holy chaunts, the abbess with a few others went in to raise and wash the body. But lo! on a sudden we heard her exclaim, Glory be to the name of the Lord!'-Soon afterwards I was called in, and,

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the door of the pavilion being opened, I saw the corpse of the holy virgin had been taken from the tomb, and was lying on a bed, like to one who slept. They then uncovered her face, and showed me the cicatrice of the incision I had formerly made, and how wonderfully the wound had healed so as only to present the thinnest scar, instead of being wide and open. All the linen too in which the body had been buried, appeared as whole and fresh as if it had only just then been wrapt about her, and moreover a marvellous virtue was soon found to attach to the clothes as well as to the coffin. The first had a power of expelling devils from persons possessed, and of curing certain distempers; of the latter it was said that some, who had diseased eyes, were immediately relieved by praying with their heads placed against it. These miraculous gifts were generally supposed to be signs of heavenly favour for her having remained a virgin although twice married, and each time to a king."

Miracles also attended the search for stone to make her new coffin. As the country of Ely supplied no stone of size sufficient for the purpose, the abbess ordered some of the brethren to go abroad and seek for the requisite materials, whereupon they set sail,-Ely at that time was completely surrounded with water and marshes, and voyaged till they came to a small, desolate town, called Grantecester. Here by a chance, which they set down for a special interference of providence in their behalf, they found at no great distance from the walls a white marble coffin beautifully wrought, with a lid of the same substance and ornamented in the same manner. Having thus achieved the object of their journey they returned to the Abbess, when by a second miracle the coffin was found to exactly fit the body of Etheldrid, the cavity even for the head being exactly of her size.

While the Anglo-Saxon kings were buried in linen, the clergy as a mark of distinction were committed to the tomb in their sacerdotal vestments. In some instances, when religion assumed its most gloomy form, men provided their own coffins in anticipation of death. Thus king Sebbi, having received the sacerdotal habit, and being warned in a vision of the time when he was to die, caused his coffin to be made for him beforehand. But by some mistake it proved too short for him, and, what was yet more strange, enlarge it as they would, it was still unable to contain

the body. Suddenly, however the stone extended itself, and to such a degree that it would now admit of a pillow being inserted under the head. Thus also when bishop John, a very holy man and famed for miraculous cures, went to visit a sick servant of Earl Addi, he found the man with a coffin standing ready at his bed-side, in case it should be wanted.

The place of burial, in like manner, was frequently chosen for themselves by the living. Many instances of this occur, a morbid familiarity with death and its funeral appearances, being a predominant feature in the religion of the Anglo-Saxons, the duties, no less than the pleasures of the present life, being often totally neglected and forgotten in their aspirations after a future state. Still nature would at times assert her rights, and we see friends and relatives attending about the bed of sickness with the usual sympathies, or mourning them, when dead, in all the bitterness of tears, as happened in the case of king Elfwin. When the body of the slain monarch was carried to York, all the people wept bitterly, tearing their hair and rending their garments in token of excessive sorrow.

The time that elapsed between the death of any one and his burial would seem to have been regulated in a degree by circumstances. Bede gives us an instance of a man being buried the day after his decease, but we have not sufficient grounds for believing that this was an usual custom.

There can be no doubt that in the earlier periods of AngloSaxon rule the bodies of the dead were interred at some distance from towns and cities. This custom, moreover, must have continued long after the introduction of Christianity, for we find Cuthbert, the eleventh Bishop from Augustine, soliciting and obtaining leave to make cemeteries within cities. An opening for this unhealthy practice having been thus made, it soon became general, and then certain restrictions were ordained, wise and wholesome in themselves, but defended by calling in the help of the grossest superstition. No enemies of the Church, nor notorious malefactors were to be buried within the holy walls, because of the horrible cries that were often uttered by them, and of the evil spirits thus let loose 'till such offenders were dug up, and cast forth from the cemetory. Many monks even were found not