A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. CHAPTER I. THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607-1013. Section I.-Britain and the English.* OR the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself. In the fifth century after the FOR birth of Christ, the one country which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay in the district which we now call Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here and there by meadows which crept down to the marshes and the sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem to have been merely an outlying fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk of whom lay probably along the middle Elbe and on the Weser. To the north of the English in their Sleswick home lay another kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their *Authorities. For the constitution and settlement of the English, see Kemble's "Saxons in England" and especially the Constitutional History of England" by Dr. Stubbs. Sir Francis Palgrave's "History of the English Commonwealth" is valuable, but to be used with care. A vigorous and accurate sketch of the early constitution may be found in Mr. Freeman's "History of the Norman Conquest," vol. i. See also "The Making of England" and "The Conquest of England" by J. R. Green. district of Jutland. To the south of them a number of German tribes had drawn together in their home-land between the Elbe and the Ems, and in a wide tract across the Ems to the Rhine, into the people of the Saxons. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low German branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers them, they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common speech, common social and political institutions. Each of them was destined to share in the conquest of the land in which we live; and it is from the union of all of them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung. Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little. But, from the glimpses which we catch of them when conquest had brought them to the shores of Britain, their political and social organization must have been that of the German race to which they belonged. The basis of their society was the free man. He alone was known as "the man," or "the churl;" and two phrases set his freedom vividly before us. He was "the free-necked man," whose long hair floated over a neck that had never bent to a lord. He was “the weaponed man," who alone bore spear and sword, for he alone possessed the right which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless outrage, the right of private war. Among the English, as among all the races of mankind, justice had originally sprung from each man's personal action. There had been a time when every freeman was his own avenger. But even in the earliest forms of English society of which we catch traces this right of self-defence was being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. The "bloodwite," or compensation in money for personal wrong, was the first effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's life and the freeman's limb had each on this system its legal price. "Eye for eye," ran the rough customary code, and "limb for limb," or for each fair damages. We see a further step towards the recognition of a wrong as done not to the individual man, but to the people at large, in another custom of early date. The price of life or limb was paid, not by the wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged. Order and law were thus made to rest in each little |