charge. These were called "conpurgators," and are evidently the origin, not only of the trial by jury, but also of the "witnesses to character" which a culprit is allowed to call at the present time. The shires were large districts containing many of all the smaller subdivisions, preserving to a great extent their own peculiar rights and privileges, but presided over by a great functionary, nominated by the king, called the Shire Reeve, now shortened into Sheriff.

With little communities of ten families, and larger ones of a hundred (groups consisting of fifty and five hundred individuals), each responsible in his own person for the behaviour of all the rest, with their tything men and hundreders to take cognizance of all their proceedings, it was difficult for an offence to escape detection. But the system had several drawbacks to counterbalance this advantage. A member could not leave the community he belonged to when he chose, for nobody would consent to be answerable for his conduct in his absence, and no new society would receive him, declining, very naturally, to be bound for the behaviour of a stranger whose character it did not know. The Frank-pledge acted as the necessity for a passport now does in some despotic kingdoms. It prevented the internal traffic of the country and the freedom of locomotion, without which no other freedom can exist. And this narrowing institution was the cause of the slow progress England made in civilization and refinement in the Anglo-Saxon period; for it confined the population in so many distinct and small communities that knowledge could not possibly become diffused. Every little clearing of the forest which gave residence and occupation to ten families kept them from intercommunication with the rest of the world. There might be twenty families of the same extent in the circuit of the same wood, but they knew nothing of each other. There was probably no road between them; and this is the way historians account for the otherwise inexplicable fact that, at a time when the population of

A.D. 872-900.]

GENIUS OF ALFRED.

59

the whole country was under a million and a half, there were more towns and hamlets than at the present time. Every fifty people who lived in the same legal enclosure constituted a "town," and only in the great cities founded by the Romans, and occupied by the Saxons or Danes, were any larger numbers to be found.

§ 7. The indefatigable activity of Alfred's mind was shown more in peace than war. With the instinctive wisdom of an English King, he perceived that there was no safety for the land but in the possession of a powerful fleet. He therefore launched his galleys from all the ports at which invasion could take place, and took command of the narrow channels dividing us from Germany and France. He cultivated letters, setting an example to future scholars in the purity and elegance with which he translated Latin authors into his native tongue. He simplified and softened the laws, abrogating the insulting and dangerous practice of assessing the lives of different populations at different sums. Henceforth, he said, all lives shall be of equal value, the Dane's life and the Englishman's. And the result was, that admiration produced what treaties and battles had not done. The sceptre of the great Anglo-Saxon stretched practically over the Danelagh, and Guthrum's position was similar to that of an inferior and yet nominally independent king in the time of the Heptarchy. A few years would have completed the amalgamation of all the nationalities, for Alfred's policy consisted in teaching the later settlers that they were as thoroughly English as their predecessors on the soil, and he guarded their tenure of the lands he had assigned them in the treaty, as the surest means of strengthening the whole island against the aggressions of less civilized hordes. The Danes, however, seemed to have an innate aversion to the steady decorum of a settled life. From time to time the seamadness took possession of them, when Alfred's death left them comparatively unchecked, and they rushed into their

ships, and devastated towns and territories with which their rulers were at peace. They pretended in their public treaties to be "Christians" and "quiet folk," but in their hearts they were pirates and heathens, as when they first sailed out of the Baltic. Edward, the son of Alfred, after several years of active warfare, succeeded in driving the Northmen beyond the Humber. Athelstane, his successor, pushed his arms still further north, and finally established the limits of his kingdom at the river Tweed. Once more the Saxon White Horse had superseded the Danish Raven, from Norfolk to Northumberland, and Athelstane was about to consolidate his authority in the newly-recovered monarchy, when a great confederacy was got up against him by all the discontented peoples he had so lately incorporated or chastised.

§ 8. Olaf, the dispossessed Norwegian king of Northumbria, took the command. There were men of all the tribes and lineages who then occupied the British soil. Danes from all their settlements, Cymri from the west coast, and Gaels from the distant Hebrides, and Scots from the Grampians, and Ancient Britons from Galloway and Dumbarton. One more chance was given to the old inhabitants to re-assert their property in the soil, supported as they were by the armies of the Northmen and the disunion of their Saxon supplanters. Among the weapons mentioned, which appeared at the great battle of Brunnenburg, the "claymore" takes a prominent place; but the broadsword, which has decided the victory on so many occasions since, was ineffectual at that time. The confederated peoples were discomfited by Athelstane, and paid dearly for their temerity in venturing on English ground. He attacked the Welsh, and exacted tribute from the fiery mountaineers. He expelled the British half of the inhabitants of Exeter, and left the whole city to its Saxon occupiers. He appointed his own magistrates over the Northumbrian Danes, and could now say with truth, that the Saxon race was dominant through all the land.

A.D. 925-955.]

ATHELSTANE AND EDMUND.

61

§ 9. The boast, however, did not stop at the limits of the present England. The power of Athelstane, as lord superior, stretched to the farthest north, and the King of Scots did homage for the country he was allowed to rule. Great in battle and great in power, Athelstane was also great in legislation. He enacted many laws, which were all of a liberal and elevating tendency; he confirmed the franchises and free lands of many of the towns, and left a reputation for wisdom and goodness which has not yet died away from the places where his benefits were bestowed. His influence extended into quarters where it was least likely to be found. The King of Norway, the ancient enemy of his country, was so impressed with his superiority in virtue as well as strength, that he sent his eldest son, afterwards King Haco, to be educated in his court; and the chieftain of the colonizing Britons who had established themselves in France, and were now expelled from Brittany by an invasion of the Normans, found an equal refuge in the palace of the king.

When this noble monarch died, in 940, the kingdom fell to Edmund, his son; and immediately the old commotions began. Cymri and Scots again tried the fate of battle, but with the same want of success as before. The impetuosity of the prince, which might have been useful to him in war, was fatal in peace. He was murdered by one of his nobles after a short and eventful reign.

Edmund was succeeded by his brother Edred, whose reign, though containing no such stirring events as a Fight of Brunnenburg, is made memorable by the first appearance in this country of the struggle which lasted till the Reformation between the civil and ecclesiastical powers.

§ 10. The Church had been making silent and unobserved advances during all those years of anarchy and danger. From the time when Augustine established his humble chair at Canterbury, and succeeded in displacing the national Christianity of the Britons to make way for the authority of Rome,

the tide of its prosperity was on the flow. The inherent excellence of the Gospel faith made it almost independent of the ignorance and ambition of its papal missionaries, and from a very early date the profession of priest and bishop became sacred, and formed a safeguard to the properties conveyed to them in the midst of the lawlessness and injustice of the times. Secure in the high consideration of the people, and enriched by the munificence of the kings and nobles, the usual effects of affluence and idleness were speedily seen. Before the end of the seventh century, the monasteries and nunneries, which were thickly spread all over the land, were the acknowledged receptacles of debauchery and vice. An ostentatious regularity in external observances was believed to compensate for every excess; and the wickedest of the nobles retired to a convent, which he endowed with his estate, to have a freer indulgence of his inclinations in the midst of drunken monks and immodest nuns, than he could expect in the world. The violences of the Danish invasions put only a temporary check to this state of affairs. The successful leaders of the northern swarm were speedily won over by the luxuriousness of their new dependents; and the result of all these combining causes was seen in the reign of Alfred, when he complained that no clergyman north of the Humber could translate his Latin prayer-book into English; and south of the Humber no clergyman could read any language whatever.

Yet this ignorant and demoralized priesthood had enormous influence on the still more ignorant population. Miracles were never wanting when grasping abbot or self-indulgent bishop required to win over or silence the multitude. As long as those performers of legerdemain tricks were on the side of the kings and nobles, no fault was found with their supernatural powers. They might divide the wood of the cross into as many chips as they chose, and heal cattle of all manner of diseases by incantations over a well, but when there arose an ambitious churchman who turned against the