complete in itself. It had its own assembly of freemen, whose voice was decisive in regulating its actions. At its head was a chief, the ealdorman, as he was named, who guided its deliberations, and who, after its arrival in England at least, headed it in war. The freemen themselves were composed of two ranks, eorls and ceorls. The eorls, or nobles by birth, whose origin is lost in the mists of the past, had an honorary pre-eminence. Their voice was of greate weight, their life was of greater value, their share of booty larger. But they did not make the State, though they had, doubtless, much to do with its direction. In fact, there was nothing that we should now call political life in existence. New legislation there was none. The old customs, handed down from father to son in Germany, were adhered to in England, and the only question which could arise for deliberation was whether some new expedition should be undertaken against the enemy. Outside the assembly, as well as within it, all freemen were equal, however much they might differ in influence or wealth. Each man had his own share of the conquered land, and his share of pasturage or wood-cutting in the folkland-the common land that had been left undivided. The organization of which he formed a part did not, as in the empire, reach from the State to the individual, but from the individual to the State. Each township which, in an ecclesiastical form, became the parish of modern days, made its appearance once a month, in the hundred mote, to decide quarrels and to witness contracts; while the members of the tribe met twice a year to decide matters of more general importance. As every man was a judge-unless, indeed, the practice of attending the hundred mote by a deputation of the reeve, or head man, and four best men of the township, had already been adopted-so every man was a soldier. The assembly was, in truth, the tribe in arms, and the eorls and the ealdormen could but lead, they could not constrain, the will of their fellow-tribesmen.

Left in the positions they had originally occupied, the tribes might have retained these institutions unaltered for centuries. The progress of the war necessitated expansion and amalgamation in order that greater force might be brought to bear on the enemy. As it had been with Rome so it was now with the English tribe. The system of popular assemblies had reached its limit. The men of Dorset or the men of Norfolk could come up without difficulty to the place of meeting. The men of a State reaching from the Severn to the borders of Sussex could not come up. The idea of delegation, if it had as yet existed at all, had not acquired sufficient strength to suggest the idea of a general collective council. Recourse was had to a different factor in the commonwealth. Of all human occupations war requires the most complete discipline and the most prompt obedience to a single chief. Naturally, therefore, it was the chief, the ealdorman, who gained most by the changes wrought by war. Every-where he took the higher title of king, and in taking its title he gained a higher standing-point. He was the bond of union between many tribes. The ealdorman who now presided in the tribal assembly derived his authority from him, even if he owed his position to an older tribal authority. At the end of the sixth century some ten or twelve kingdoms existed, and the authority of the kings would, doubtless, tend to increase in civil matters as they grew more successful as leaders in war.

Yet, growing as it was, the king's authority was by no means absolute. The power which the king wielded could only be exercised in accordance with the wishes of the armed force, and that armed force was still, in great measure, composed of the contingents of the freemen of the several tribes. It is true that it was not so altogether. By an old German custom a great man had been accustomed to entertain a body of followers-gesiths, as they were called in England-who attached themselves, not to the tribe, but to the person of

him whom they followed, and upon whose bounty they lived. For him they fought, and for him they were ready to die. They held it disgraceful to forsake him in battle, or even to leave the field alive if he were lying dead upon it. No doubt, if we possessed a history of those times, we should find that these two component parts of the king's army were also component parts of his council, and the witan, or wise men, without whose advice he did not venture to act in any important matter, were, some of them, the chief men of his personal following; some of them leading eorls, or land-owners, from the various populations which were blended together under his rule. But, however this council may have been formed, it had no immediate organic connection with the people. Its members were not elected from beneath. They became councilors either from their own position in life, or as selected by the king. As long as there was a powerful enemy in the field this breach in the continuity of the constitution might not be felt; but it was, none the less, a source of danger.

The judicial arrangements of our ancestors were those of a strong-handed but law-loving race, in which each man was ready to do himself right with his own hand, but in which there was a general understanding that feuds should not be perpetual. The notion that it was the duty of the State to punish crime, and the notion that the criminal himself was any the worse for the crime which he had committed, would have been alike unintelligible to them. All that they saw was that it was in their power to enforce upon the kindred of a murdered man, or upon him who had suffered a loss of property, the acceptance of a weregild, or money payment, in satisfaction of the injury done to them, which they might otherwise have avenged by the slaughter of the aggressor. As, again, the power of taking vengeance was different in different ranks-as the relations of a murdered king were more likely to take effectual vengeance than the relations of

an eorl or a simple ceorl, and as they, therefore, required more to induce them to draw back-a larger money payment was enforced in proportion to the rank of the person injured. As, too, the State had no interest in the matter, excepting to prevent continual private warfare, it had no trained police to seize the criminal, and no trained advocates or judges to investigate evidence. It looked to the kindred of the accused person to present him before the popular assembly at which he was to be tried, or to pay his weregild in his stead. If he denied his guilt he had to bring others to swear that he was innocent, and the declaration of the belief of these compurgators in his favor was accepted as satisfactory. If he failed to find compurgators he had still the resource of appealing to the ordeal, doubtless performed, in heathen times, in some specially sacred spot. The assembled people, who acted as his judges, contented themselves with seeing that the provisions of ancient customs were duly carried out.

III.

CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH.-MILMAN.

[The conquerors had scarcely established themselves in the land when a contest began between the different English kingdoms for supremacy. To the war between Britons and Englishmen was added a war between Englishmen and Englishmen. The struggle went on for two hundred years. and culminated in the final supremacy of Wessex. Long before the end of this period, however, an event had occurred which contributed powerfully to the work of consolidation and unification. This was the conversion of the heathen English to Christianity. The work was accomplished in the south by Roman, in the north by Irish, missionaries. The two tides of Christian influence met in the center of England. After a brief struggle the Roman party triumphed, in 664, at the Synod of Whitby, and Archbishop Theodore organized the new Church on the Roman model.]

NOTHING certain is known concerning the first promulgation of the Gospel in Roman Britain. There can be no doubt,

however, that conquered and half-civilized Britain, like the rest of the Roman Empire, gradually received, during the second and third centuries, the faith of Christ. The depth of her Christian cultivation appears from her fertility in saints, and in heretics. But all were swept away, the worshipers of the saints and the followers of the beretics, by the Teutonic conquest. The German races which overran the island came from a remote quarter yet unpenetrated by the missionaries of the Gospel. They knew nothing of Christianity but as the religion of that abject people whom they were driving before them into their mountains and fortresses. Christianity receded, with the conquered Britons, into the mountains of Wales, or toward the borders of Scotland, or took refuge among the peaceful and flourishing monasteries of Ireland. The clergy fled, perhaps fought, with their flocks, and neither sought nor found opportunities of amicable intercourse, which might have led to the propagation of their faith; while the savage pagans demolished the churches and monasteries, with the other vestiges of Roman civilization. They were little disposed to worship the God of a conquered people or to adopt the religion of a race whom they either despised as weak and unwarlike, or held as stubborn and implacable enemies. Nor was there sufficient charity in the British Christians to enlighten the paganism of their conquerors.

Happily Christianity appeared in an opposite quarter. Its missionaries from Rome were unaccompanied by any of these causes of mistrust and dislike. It came into that part of the kingdom the farthest removed from the hostile Britons. It was the religion of the powerful kingdom of the Franks; the influence of Bertha, the Frankish princess, the wife of King Ethelbert, wrought, no doubt, more powerfully for the reception of the faith than the zeal and eloquence of Augustine.

Gregory the Great, it has been said, before his accession to the papacy, had set out on the sublime though desperate mission of the reconquest of Britain from idolatry. It was Greg