СНАР. II. $19. The Eorls superseded by the Thegns. neighbour, but to be protected, without the burden of Two classes of men, the eorls and the gesiths, had been marked out from their fellows at the time of the conquest. The thegn of Edgar's day differed from both, but he had some of the distinguishing marks of either. He was not like the gesith, a mere personal follower of the king. He did not, like the eorl, owe his position to his birth. Yet his relation to the king was a close one, and he had a hold upon the land as firm as that of the older eorl. He may, perhaps, best be described as a gesith who had acquired the position of an eorl without entirely throwing off his own characteristics. Of the details of the change which took place we can only speak with hesitation. The period which separated the reign of Edgar from the Teutonic conquest was five hundred years, a period as long as that which separates the reign of Victoria from the reign of Edward III. Of this period our notices are scanty. But there can be little doubt that the change began in the practice of granting special estates in the folkland, or common undivided land, to special persons. At first this land was doubtless held to be the property of the tribe, and only granted away by the king with the consent of the tribe. When the king rose above the tribes, he granted it himself with the consent of his Witan. A large portion was granted to churches and monasteries. But a large portion went in private estates, or book land, as it was called, from the book or charter which conveyed them to the king's own gesiths, or to members of his own family. The gesith thus ceased to be a mere member of the king's military household. He became a landowner as well, with special duties to perform to the king, but nevertheless with the feeling of independence which the possession of land is apt to give. His example too told on others. If he strengthened the king's hands, his relation to the king gave him strength. He had special jurisdiction given him over his tenants and serfs, exempting him and them from the authority of the hundred mote, though they still remained, except in very exceptional cases, under the authority of the shire mote. Eorls who D СНАР. СНАР. 20. The Change gradual. had no such privilege, we may well believe, though there is no direct evidence on the point, coveted his advantages, and acquired from the king the rights and duties of the thegnhood. Even the simple freeholder discovered the weakness of his isolated condition, and commended himself and his land to a wealthy thegn, engaging to do him service and to be judged in his court, in return for support and protection. Even up to the Norman conquest this change was still going on. To the end, indeed, the old constitutional forms were not broken down. The hundred mote was not abandoned, where freemen enough remained to fill it. Even where all the land of a hundred had passed under the protection of a lord there was little outward change. The tenants were summoned to hear causes under the presidency of the lord's officer, instead of being summoned under presidency of an officer appointed by themselves or by the king. But that was all. The shire mote too was still in existence. Even in war the obligation of all men to defend the country was still enforced, though it pressed with a special force upon the king's thegns. There was thus no actual breach of continuity in the nation. The thegnhood pushed its roots down, as it were, amongst the free classes. Nevertheless there was a danger of such a breach of continuity coming about. The freeman entered more and more largely into a condition of dependence, and there was a great risk lest such a condition of dependence should become a condition of servitude. Here and there, by some extraordinary stroke of luck, a freeman might rise to be a thegn. But the condition of the class to which he belonged was deteriorating every day.. The downward progress to serfdom was too easy to take, and by large masses of the population it was already taken. Below the increasing II. $21. The King and the Wite nagemot. numbers of the serfs was to be found the lower class of CHAP. slaves, who were actually the property of their masters. The Witenagemot was in reality a select body of thegns, if the bishops, who held their lands in much the same way, be regarded as thegns. It was rather an inchoate House of Lords, than an inchoate Parliament, after our modern ideas. It was natural that a body of men which united a great part of the wealth with almost all the influence in the kingdom should be possessed of high constitutional powers. The Witenagemot elected the king, though as yet they always chose him out of the royal family, which was held to have sprung from the god Woden. There were even cases in which they deposed unworthy kings. Their consent was necessary to make peace, to declare war, or to make a grant of folkland. No act of public importance was valid without their consent. No ealdorman was appointed, no bishop placed in his see, without their voice being heard in the matter. It would thus be easy to argue from one set of facts that the king was almost a cypher, just as from another set of facts it would be easy to argue that he was almost absolute. In truth, he was neither absolute nor a cypher. Kings like Alfred and his descendants had done pretty much as they wished, because they wished nothing which would be opposed to the wishes of the thegns. The more wealthy a man was, the more desirous he would be that his land might remain his own, instead of becoming the property of a sea-roving Dane. At home, as long as the king was a man of ability and character, there was no opposition of interests as yet between the king and his thegns. He himself was but as a thegn on his He too had tenants and serfs whose own estates. ancestors had once been freemen on his lands. As in the shiremoot the ealdorman and the bishop sat side by side, so sat Archbishop Dunstan by the side CHAP. II. of Edgar. After the legends which have obscured his fame are swept away, we descry, though dimly, the form $22. Dun- of a great statesman. The Danish wars had swept away s'an's eccle siastical Policy. the culture which had sent forth missionaries to the continent in earlier days, and which Alfred had striven hard to revive. Dunstan's life-long work was the work of an educationalist. He strove to bring back to England the knowledge and culture in which it was now outstript by the continent. He sought the moral training of his countrymen as well as their intellectual advancement. It was inevitable that in so doing he should throw in his lot with the monks. The conditions which enable a married clergy to hold up an example of life to their parishioners did not then exist. There was no open-eyed public opinion around the parish priest, no widely spread publicity calling for watchfulness against the temptation of turning the means which were intended to enable him to instruct others into property for the sustenance of his own family. Family cares devoured him, and it was well if, living as other men did, he did not become partaker in their sins. It would have been no wonder if Dunstan, like Hildebrand and Damiani after him, had sought to confront the evil by the drastic remedy of the proclamation of universal clerical celibacy. It is the mark of his greatness that he did nothing of the kind. He did not indeed resist two bishops who drove out the secular clergy from certain specified ecclesiastical houses in the dioceses, of Winchester and Worcester. But he did not imitate them himself, and, as far as we know, he gave no encouragement to those who wished to do so. The monk, he believed, being bound to a celibate life, could give himself to his spiritual and educational mission as the married priest could not. But he steadily refused to use compulsion in favour of that which he regarded as the better life. He preferred working by example. |
