The

by giving it a setting in general history. contrast which he made between "the Roman idea and the English idea" exhibited the theory in its most attractive form, and although he got the idea from Freeman he surpassed Freeman in literary dexterity of treatment. He avoided the use of such a technical term as the Mark, and availed himself of American prepossessions by speaking of it as a town-meeting. He held that from a cluster of towns the county-meeting emerged, but he was careful to add that this took place "while the county is a little state in itself and not a mere administrative district." The qualification was prudent for the very term county implies an administrative district issuing from royal authority. He then proceeded:

"And in this county-meeting we may observe a singular feature, something never seen before in the world, something destined to work out vaster political results than Caesar ever dreamed of. This county-meeting is not a primary assembly; all the freemen from all the townships can not leave their homes and their daily business to attend it. Nor is it merely an assembly of notables, attended by the most important men of the neighborhood. It is a representative assembly, attended by select men from each township. We may see in it the germ of the British parliament and of the American congress, as indeed of all modern legislative bodies, for it is a most suggestive commentary upon what we are saying that in all other countries which

have legislatures, they have been copied, within quite recent times, from English or American models."

The theory had now reached a stage of development at which it took rank as established doctrine. What in the original authorities had been offered as reasonable conjecture or as being a probable interpretation of fragmentary data, had, without any additional evidence, been gradually converted into a certainty upon which great constitutional principles could be safely based.

CHAPTER VII

OPPOSITION TO THE DOCTRINE

The

PROFESSOR FREEMAN did not have everything his own way in spreading his doctrine. archaeologists found more extensive survivals of Roman civilization in England after the barbarian invasions than was convenient for Free-, man's theory. An elaborate work, based upon minute investigation of British antiquities, was published by Thomas Wright in 1852.1 He made no mention of the Mark and spoke as if it had never existed. He said: "The population of the country consisted of two elements the chiefs and their followers, who had obtained possession and lordship of the lands, and the agriculturists and laborers, who were in the position of serfs and bondmen, and comprised chiefly the old Romano-British population, which under the Saxons was probably quite as well off as under the Romans."

1 Thomas Wright (1810–1877), of Quaker descent, attended Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a founder of the British Archaeological Association, and devoted his life to pursuits of that order. His activities included research in Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, as well as field exploration of relics of antiquity. His principal work was The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon.

He did not find that the town-meeting with its apparatus for free discussion of public affairs had ever existed, but he found evidence that municipal institutions were perpetuated under AngloSaxon rule, as convenient apparatus for supplying tribute:

"The Saxons thus held the country, while the Roman citizens continued to hold the towns as tributaries of the Saxon kings, within whose bounds they stood. The country thus exhibited Teutonic rudeness, while the towns were the representatives of Roman civilization, and though the intercourse between the two, and the gradual infusion of Saxon blood in the towns, laid the foundation of modern society, there was a feeling of hostility and rivalry between town and country, which has hardly yet disappeared. Between the aristocratic feeling of the Saxon landholders, and the republican principles that existed in the towns, arose, under the balancing influence of the crown, the modern political constitution."

These views of English origins were corroborated by conclusions at which ethnologists arrived as to the persistence of Celtic race types in the population of England notwithstanding the successive Teutonic invasions. This class of evidence was ordinarily disregarded by historians of the Freeman school as being based upon obscure and conflicting data lying outside of the field of history, but it could not always be ig

nored. The London Times of October 11, 1887, published a special article on "The British Race Types Today," which gave a résumé of opinions held by ethnologists and incidentally remarked:

"For a generation or more the advocates of the view that the English are almost unmixed Teutons pressed their views upon the scientific and literary world with a persistence and learning which went far to produce conviction."

Professor T. H. Huxley at once pounced upon this sentence and in a curt letter which appeared in the next day's issue of The Times he said:

"I can not answer for the literary world; but to the best of my knowledge, neither the persistence nor the learning of the advocates of this baseless. notion produced the slightest effect upon scientific ethnologists."

Of course everybody recognized that this was a slam at Professor Freeman, and he made a prompt reply from his Oxford chair. In lectures beginning on November 24, 1887,1 he dealt at length with the objections to his theory, brought forward by archaeologists and ethnologists. He made some concessions, but he claimed that the true fortress of his theory was still intact. He said:

1 Included in a work entitled Four Oxford Lectures; London: Macmillan & Co., 1888.