now begin to be issued by the king to the bishops, thanes, and reeves of the shires, without the consent of the Witenagemot. These writs are mostly grants of land, and we now see that the old ideas about Folkland are giving way, and that the king, instead of the nation, is beginning to be looked upon as the owner of the public land.

Earldoms.

On the other hand, the division of the kingdom by Cnut into four great earldoms, Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria, opened the way for the rise of great The four feudal families in whose hands a weak king would great be almost powerless. This was not contemplated by Cnut, who regarded the four great earls1 as his officers; bound to obey his writs, and removable at his pleasure. But in the next reign the possible evil of the division was fully realised. It seems also, as far as we can speak with certainty on a very obscure subject, that since the Danish conquest the jurisdiction of the nobles in their own lands was prevailing more and more, and that in this direction also the tendency towards feudalism was growing.

It is now time that we should take a closer look at feudalism, and see what it was really like. We shall better understand what it was in England if we look at it Feudalism. first in France. In France, in the eleventh century,

feudalism was fully grown, and its evils were at their height. All the land of the country (at any rate in the north o France) was held by feudal tenures; that is, it was not held as absolute property, but as a loan or fief, on certain conditions, generally on condition of military service. Every lesser noble was the man or vassal of some greater noble, and the greater nobles in turn were the vassals of the king; but the authority of the king was a mere shadow, the great nobles were in reality quite independent. The land was covered with castles; in every castle dwelt a noble, a seigneur as he was called in France, whose power over all around him was absolute. The people who dwelt in the village which clustered round his castle were his serfs, bound to till the land for his benefit; the burghers of the neighbouring town had to pay him tolls, and very often he made his castle a robber's nest, from which he pounced on all

1 The old title of Ealdorman is now dropped, and the Danish word Earl is used instead.

The seig

travellers and merchants, and plundered them. neur's life was utterly idle; he had no amusements but hunting and fighting. He was always quarrelling with the neighbouring seigneurs; indeed, causes of quarrel could not fail to arise, because of the thousand ins and outs of the feudal relations, one seigneur being often the lord of another seigneur for a fief which he had granted him, and at the same time vassal of the same seigneur for a fief which he held of him. The variety was also immense in the conditions on which fiefs were held. There were courts to judge these quarrels, courts of peers they were called, meetings of the barons. But these courts were of very little use, because there was no State, no central authority higher than the nobles, and able to enforce its decrees. The only remedy for private grievances was that the seigneur took the law into his own hands, and sallied forth to attack his enemy.

The wretched country people were exposed to all the storms of these private wars, as well as to all the exactions of their seigneur. They were bound to the soil, and could not change their lord. If he was a bad lord, they were wholly in his power; his bailiff could squeeze out of them the uttermost farthing. There was no State to protect them; the king had no authority within the domains of the count or baron. The seigneur made laws, and was supreme judge. The Church was the only helper of the poor, but even in the Church their merciless lord could pursue them; the escaped serf who had taken orders could be claimed by his lord even in the ranks of the clergy. No wonder the people said the castles were built by the inspiration of the devil; no wonder feudalism has left behind it such a hated name.

The worst features of feudalism were unknown in England. The great reason of this was the entire difference Feudalism between the English conquest of Britain and the in England. Frank conquest of Gaul. The English conquest was an immigration as well as a conquest; the English were not a handful of conquerors scattered over an immense territory. The original Roman-Celtic inhabitants formed the mass of the nation in Gaul, and many of them kept their wealth and high position. The English were themselves the nation in England; for the Welsh (except in the western shires) were slain or driven out. The mass of the people being English, the old free customs, the meetings of the

people, their laws and rights, lived on, instead of dying out as they did in Gaul. For in Gaul too the Franks at first had their popular assemblies, the meetings of the county and of the hundred, but these meetings died of neglect, because people could not take the trouble to go to them, and because Charlemagne, who wished to be a great Roman emperor, appointed judges instead. Then there were no castles in England; the noble did not build himself a nest whence he might tyrannise over the people, but lived in a great hall, where he kept open house at night; and in early times the villagers round about him were more or less his kinsmen. He had jurisdiction in some cases over his vassals, but he did not give laws to them; the law of England was above him. He was a magistrate and not a tyrant. The ceorl had his rights as well as the noble. Above all, in England there was a king; there was a central authority to keep the nobles in order.

It is not needful to point out again that if the kingly power had not grown steadily from the ninth century onwards, the power of the nobles would have grown much more independent than it was, and England might have been split up into a number of feudal states like France. The growth of feudalism in England consisted mainly in the increase of the power of the great landlords. Allodial land, that is, land which was wholly a man's own, was Commendabecoming less and less common, for those who tion on the had commended themselves and their lands to the increase. protection of some thane or earl had lost the direct right of property; they now held their lands on condition of certain fixed services to these thanes or earls.

I have already spoken' of the way in which the ancient marks or parishes tended to become absorbed in the estates of the nobles. The freemen of the mark, either because they were not strong enough to hold their own, or because the expense of freeman's service in war was greater than they could bear, or perhaps because they were too poor to furnish their lands with stock, commended themselves and their lands to some neighbouring thane, who henceforth looked upon their lands as his own, granted to them at his pleasure, and their ancient rights in commons and forests as grants

1 See Chap. IV. p. 37.

proceeding from his favour. This was how the mark passed into the manor.1

The most important consequence of this change was the rise of manorial jurisdictions, that is, the right of the lord to Feudal try the causes of his dependents in his own court. jurisdiction. This right arose naturally out of the lord's right to take away from his vassal the land he had bestowed, or was supposed to have bestowed on him, and out of his obligation to answer for those who were in pledge to him.2 For since the time of Athelstan it had been made law that every man should be in pledge, that is, that he should find some one to answer for him, in case he were accused of any crime.

courts not

discon

The mark meeting, in which the local affairs of the mark had been settled, now became the court of the manor. This, Popular of course, put a great power into the hands of the nobles. The hundred courts also fell largely into tinued. their hands. But the old popular forms were still observed in these courts, and were the safeguards of ancient liberties. And the folk-moot of the shire had still a jurisdiction superior to that of the manorial courts, and prevented the whole administration of justice from falling into the hands of the nobles. Atthese shire-moots, as has been already remarked, the voice of the people was constantly appealed to to declare what the law was, or to give evidence about rights in land. Another thing which tended to keep up an independent spirit among the people, was that they were themselves called

The Hundreds and Frithguilds.

upon to help in carrying out the law. From the time of Edgar, if not before, the inhabitants of every hundred formed a sort of association which was bound to pursue thieves and recover stolen property. I will not enter into the perplexed question of the origin of the name hundred, which now belongs to the divisions of the shires. But it would appear that these associations for protection against theft were at first voluntary. In the reign of Athelstan we find in the city of London frith-guilds, or peace-clubs, (which were also called tithings) consisting of ten men each, both nobles and ceorls, who not only sub

1 The word Manor was at first used only of the lord's house. It properly belongs to Norman times only; but the thing existed before, and the word is the most convenient one to use.

2 The civil jurisdiction arose thus; the criminal jurisdiction was conferred by royal grant sometimes, but generally reserved by the Crown. See Stubbs, Cons. Hist., i. 187.

scribed to a common purse to make good losses by theft, but also undertook to pursue the thief, and recover the stolen property. This idea of association once grasped, it was extended on all sides, and the law took hold of it. In Edgar's reign (959-975) we find the hundreds apparently divided into tithings, and the tithing-men are bound to ride after a thief, and do justice upon him. And it would seem (though this is a much-disputed question) that in the reign of Cnut this responsibility of the tithings for the maintenance of peace was extended so far, that the members of a tithing were bound to hold one another to right in case any one of them were accused; an institution which appears in a more developed form after the Norman conquest under the name of frank-pledge.

Beside the tithings, the frith-guilds upheld by law, there were many other kinds of guilds, some of them very like the friendly societies or benefit clubs of the present day.

On the Continent also these associations were formed by the people to protect themselves when the law was too weak to protect them. But on the Continent they were put down with a high hand by kings and bishops; they were not trusted. In England, on the contrary, the kings trusted them, and made use of them as a means of keeping order. The reason no doubt was that England being a smaller country, and king and people being of the same race, they knew one another, and there was sympathy between them.

Thus, while society was taking more and more a feudal shape, the old forms of popular participation in the carrying out of the law kept up the life of the people, Vitality of and prevented them from becoming entirely the popular institutions. passive serfs of the nobles. Feudalism in England never had all things its own way. But feudalism was a needful step in the development of England as of other European countries.

In the first place, society was not yet ripe for organisation on a large scale. It could only form into clusters of small organisations. When a great wind has Feudalism a blown over a sandy shore, the sand collects in necessary tiny heaps round every little pebble on the shore. developBy degrees the larger heaps join together, and ment. form sand-hills. So after the storm-wind of Teutonic inva

G

stage of