while the first ceased to be witnesses and became only judges of the testimony given. It was the abolition of the ordeal system in 1216 which led the way to the establishment of what is called a 'petty jury' for the final trial of the prisoner. Centuries were to pass, however, before the complete separation of the functions of juryman and witness should be effected.

The 'Meeting of Wise Men' no longer retained, under Alfred, its character of a national gathering, as when the Saxons preserved in simplicity their Germanic institutions. Then all freemen, whether owners of land or not, composed part of it. Gradually, by the non-attendance or indifference of the people, only the great proprietors were left; and, without the formal exclusion of any class of its members, it shrunk up into an aristocratic assembly.

After the Conquest, in the reign of John, the national council was a gathering, at the king's bidding, of all who held their lands directly from the crown, both clerical and lay. It was like the 'Meeting of the Wise Men,' only more people sat in it, and they were the king's feudal vassals. Those who were entitled to be present, could only be present themselves - could not send representatives. At the county courts, groups of men sent from the various parts of the shire represented, in the transaction of business, the whole free folk of the shire. Slowly and tentatively this principle was applied to the constitution of the Great Council. Henry III and his barons alike ordered the choice of 'discreet knights' from every county, 'to meet on the common business of the realm.' In 1246, the word parliament was first. used as the name of the council. The extension of electoral rights to the freeholders at large is seen in the king's writ of 1264, sent to the higher clergy, earls, and barons; to the sheriffs, cities, and boroughs throughout England, commanding the former three to come in person, the latter to send representatives. It was long, however, before the chosen deputies were admitted to a share in deliberative power. In 1295, Edward gathered at Westminster an assembly that was in every sense a national Parliament. It straightway fulfilled the sole duty of a Parliament in those days,-voted the king a supply. Two years later the one thing still wanting was gained,—a solemn acknowledgment by the king that it alone had power to tax the nation. The idea of

representation has risen. 'It is a most just law,' says Edward, 'that what concerns all should be approved of by all, and that common dangers should be met by measures provided in common.' In Edward's reign, the barons began to hold their deliberations privately. The knights from the shires and the deputies from the towns formed a second chamber. From this time, therefore, dates the origin of the House of Lords and the House of Com

mons.

The rights of self-government, of free speech in free meeting, of equal justice by one's peers, were brought safely across the ages of Norman tyranny by the traders and shopkeepers, who alone, unnoticed and despised by prelate and noble, had preserved the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. Henry I, promising to govern the English according to their own wishes, with wisdom and moderation, granted them a first charter, which, though of short duration, was the first limitation imposed on the despotism of the Conquest. A hundred years later, the barons extorted from King John the glorious and powerful Magna Charta,— ever after the basis of the English freedom, the corner-stone of the noble edifice of the Constitution. Life, liberty, and property were protected. No man could henceforth be detained in prison. without trial. No man would have to buy justice. These words, honestly interpreted, convey an ample security for the two main rights of civil society:

No freeman shall be seized or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way brought to ruin: we will not go against any man nor send against him, save by legal judg ment of his peers or by the law of the land. To no man will we sell, to no man will we deny or delay, justice or right.'

At the end of the thirteenth century, the charters were SO firmly established that no monarch would venture to disturb them.

Small and obscure are the beginnings of great political institutions, and unforeseen are the tremendous results of the actor's deeds, who, as he casts the seed into the soil, little dreams of the mighty and perpetual germination it will disclose in after days.

Society. By Alfred's day, it was assumed that no man could exist without dependence upon a superior. The ravages and long insecurity of the Danish wars drove the freeholder to seek protection from the thane. His freehold was surrendered to be received back as a fief, laden with service to its lord. Gradually

the 'lordless' man became a sort of outlaw; the free churl, who had held his land straight from the Maker of it, sank into the villain,' and with his personal freedom went his share in the government. The bulk of the workmen are serfs. In a dialogue of the tenth century, written for popular instruction, the ploughman says: 'I labor much. I go out at daybreak, urging the oxen to the field, and I yoke them to the plough. I am bound to plough every day a full acre or more.' The herdsman says: 'When the ploughman separates the oxen, I lead them to the meadows, and all night I stand watching over them on account of thieves; and again in the morning I take them to the plough, well-fed and watered.' And the shepherd: 'In the first part of the morning I drive my sheep to their pasture, and stand over them in heat and cold with my dogs, lest the wolves destroy them. I lead them back to their folds, and milk them twice a day; and I move their folds, and make cheese and butter, and am faithful to my lord.'

The military oppression of the Normans levelled all degrees of tenants and servants into a modified slavery. The English lord was pushed from his place by the Norman baron, and sank into the position from which he had thrust the churl. The peasant -the producer—had no alternative but to abide from the cradle to the grave in one spot, and was held to be only fulfilling his natural destiny when he toiled without hope for the privileged consumer: Why should villains eat beef or any dainty food?' asks one of the Norman minstrels.

The social organization of every rural part of England rested on the manorial system,- a division of the land, for purposes of cultivation and internal order, into a number of large estates. The lord of the manor, instead of cultivating the estate through his own bailiff, at length found it more convenient and profitable to distribute it among tenants at a given rent, payable either in money or in produce. This habit of leasing afforded an opportunity by which the aspiring among the tenantry could rise to a position of apparent equality with their older masters. The growing use of the words 'farm' and 'farmer' from the twelfth century mark the initial steps of a peasant revolution. The

1 A peasant, one of the lowest class of feudal tenants; a bondman, and later a vile, wicked person. One of the many words which men have dragged downwards with themselves, and made more or less partakers of their own fall.

tenants were subject to many exactions. The lord's bull and boar were free, under the conditions of tenure, to range at night through their standing corn and grass; and their sheep,- for they were permitted to acquire and hold property upon sufferance, were always to be folded on their master's land. That the land was indifferently farmed we may well believe, when we learn that the highest rent was seven pence an acre, and the lowest a farthing. The rise of the farmer class was soon followed by that of the free laborer. Influences, indeed, had long been quietly freeing the peasantry from their local bondage. Prior to the Conquest, pure slavery was gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church. Subsequently she urged emancipation, as a mark of piety, on all estates but her own. The fugitive bondsman found freedom in chartered towns, where a residence of one year and a day conferred franchise. The pomp of chivalry and the cost of incessant campaigns drained the royal and baronial purse; and the sale of freedom to the serf, or of exemption from services to the villain, afforded an easy and tempting mode of replenishment. Thus, by a solemn deed in 1302, for forty marks, 'Robert Crul and Matilda his wife, with all his offspring begotten and to be begotten, together with all his goods holden and to be holden,' was rendered 'forever free and quit from all yoke of servitude.'

In the silent growth and elevation of the people, the boroughs led the way. The English town was originally a piece of the general country, where people, either for purposes of trade or protection, happened to cluster more closely than elsewhere. It was organized and governed in the same way as the manors around it, justice was administered, its customary services exacted, its annual rent collected, by the officer of the king, noble, or ecclesiastic, to whose estate it belonged. Its inhabitants were bound to reap their lord's corn crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his pound. Its dues paid and services rendered, however, property and person alike were secured against arbitrary seizure. The townsman's rights were rigidly defined by custom, and by custom were constantly widening. By disuse or forgetfulness, services would disappear, while privileges and immunities were being for the most part purchased by hard bargaining. At Leicester, for instance, one of the chief

aims of its burgesses was to regain their old English practice of compurgation, for which had been substituted the foreign trial by duel. Says a charter of the time:

It chanced that two kinsmen . . . waged a duel about a certain piece of land, concerning which a dispute had arisen between them; and they fought from the first to the ninth hour, each conquering by turns. Then one of them fleeing from the other till he came to a certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit, and was about to fall therein, his kinsman said to him, "Take care of the pit, turn back lest thou shouldest fall into it." Thereat so much clamor and noise was made by the by-standers and those who were sitting around, that the Earl heard these clamors as far off as the castle, and he inquired of some how it was there was such a clamor, and answer was made to him that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain piece of ground, and that one had fled till he reached a certain little pit, and that, as he stood over the pit and was about to fall into it, the other warned him. Then the townsmen, being moved with pity, made a covenant with the Earl that they should give him three pence yearly for each house in the High Street that had a gable, on condition that he should grant to them that the twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient times should from that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they might have among themselves.'

At the close of the thirteenth century, all the more important towns had secured freedom of trade, of justice, and of government. Their liberties and charters served as models and incentives to the smaller communities struggling into existence. While the tendency at first seems to have been agricultural, at the Conquest it had become mercantile, and the controlling class was the merchant guild. Wealth and industry developed into dangerous rivalry a second class, composed of escaped serfs, of traders without lands, of the artisans and the poor. Without share in the right and regulation of trade, their struggles for power and privilege began in the reign of the first Henry, and their turbulent election of a London mayor in 1261 marks their final victory.

In the tenth century, a man wished for two things,— not to be slain, and to have a good leather coat. The state of warfare still contends against the state of order. The right of aggrieved persons to interfere with the sober course of the law is acknowledged even by Alfred:

We also command that the man who knows his foe to be home-sitting, fight not before he demand justice of him. If he have such power that he can beset his foe and besiege him within, let him keep him within for seven days, and attack him not if he will remain within.'

There are so many pagan Danes and other disreputable persons scattered up and down the land, that society must protect itself in a summary fashion:

If a stranger or foreigner shall wander from the highway, and then neither call out nor sound a horn, he is to be taken for a thief and killed, or redeemed by fine."