The what the exact nature of the change was. large number of hundreds in the coast districts may point to some secondary connection with Alfred's schemes of national defence. But its main significance, as Alfred left it, was that it is a judicial sub-division of the shire. Although the hundred had had a military significance in its origin, it became chiefly an organisation for judicial and police purposes. A hundred was a district in which there was a hundred court. If it was regarded as a privilege to have a hundred court in the immediate neighbourhood, as to-day it is an object of ambition in rising towns to have a "borough bench," Alfred may have granted the right to establish a court in return for definite defensive obligations undertaken by the district. In the time of Edgar one ship was due from every three hundreds, and this may have been a development from the earlier obligation. In Alfred's time it may have had to do with the building of forts, or the upkeep and guarding of forts already erected. A document which gives details of the "Burgal Hidage," or the list of hides of land dependent on the burhs of Wessex, indicates that some arrangement of this kind was made. The large number of hundreds in Wessex is in any case a testimony to the "greater local activity and to the sense of administrative order which led Wessex to her final supremacy." When Alfred came to be King of Mercia as well as Wessex, and began to press the Danes backwards, he probably re-grouped the hundreds of the West and SouthWest Midlands into new groups, forming his new shires, and giving each group its fortress. Το these new shires he appointed new aldermen, keeping the old tribal aldermen, who represented the old royal families of the various folk, wherever that was possible. The success of the administrative and defensive organisation in the victorious kingdom would account for its imitation and adaptation throughout England at a later time; and it is probable that the extension of the system throughout England was made easier by the existence of a judicial institution among the Danes analogous to the hundred.1 1 An article entitled the "Hidation of some Southern Counties" in the Eng. Hist. Review, 1899, by F. Baring, suggests a different explanation of the inequalities of the hundred. Chapter III Peacemakers "It is God's highest glory to give peace among men, "A king that sitteth on the throne of judgment, Is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice." The Proverbs of Solomon. "Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating unjust gain; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens: and let them judge the people at all seasons : and it shall be that every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge themselves: so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee. If thou shalt do this thing and God command thee so, then thou shalt be able to endure, and all this people also shall go to their place in peace."-Book of Exodus. ALFRED'S reign, and that of his son, exhibit traces of a remarkable evolution in judicial organisation and ideas. Evolution is an oily word, and the ease with which it slips from the tongue or the pen helps to prevent the effort to realise how much in the way of toil, disappointment, energy, deter mination, what anxieties, irritations, misunderstandings, fears, hopes, doubtings, aspirations, defeats, victories, how much honest hard work and sweat of hand and brow, are involved in the achievement of even one stage in the evolution of a single national institution. "Hardship and sorrow," Alfred breaks out, "not a king but would wish to be without these if he could. But I know that he cannot." Asser gives a glimpse of the human side of this evolution, which enables us to see something of the effort involved in the attempt to establish an efficient system of justice. The worth of the work Alfred did will perhaps be best understood if we consider first Asser's account of what it cost the king and his servants. Asser has done good service by preserving some of these details as they appeared to him. It is such facts as he preserves which give blood and muscle to the skeleton of constitutional history, and make it a living thing. "The king, eager to give up to God the half of his daily service, as he had vowed, and more also, if his ability on the one hand, and his malady on the other, would allow him, showed himself a minute investigator of the truth in all his judgments, and this especially for the sake of the poor, to whose interest, day and night, among other duties of this life, he ever was wonderfully attentive. For in the whole kingdom the poor, besides him, had few or no protectors; for all the powerful and noble of that country had turned their thoughts rather to secular than to heavenly things: each was more bent on secular matters to his own profit, than on the public good. [Note that when this king devotes his time to the service of God, he affords justice to the poor.] He strove also in his own judgments for the benefit of both the noble and the ignoble, who were constantly at obstinate variance with one another in the folk-moots before ealdorman and reeve, so that hardly any one of them would grant that to be true doom that had been judged for doom by the ealdormen and reeves. [Note the exact difficulty; the local courts could not enforce submission or ensure acceptance of their verdicts on those who applied to them, especially when the dispute lay between noble and ceorl. The king's problem was how to make one justice for rich and poor alike.] "And in consequence of this pertinacious and obstinate dissension, all desired to have the judgment of the king, and both sides sought at once to gratify their desire. But if any one was conscious of injustice on his side in the suit, though by law and agreement he was compelled, however reluctantly, to go before the king, yet with his own good-will he never would consent to go. For he O |