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 heretics, 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

ory who commissioned the monk Augustine to venture on this glorious service. Yet so fierce and savage, according to the common rumor, were the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain, that Augustine shrank from the wild and desperate enterprise; he hesitated before he would throw himself into the midst of a race of barbarous unbelievers, of whose language he was ignorant. Gregory would allow no retreat from a mission which he had himself been prepared to undertake, and which would not have appalled, even under less favorable circumstances, his firmer courage.

The fears of Augustine as to this wild and unknown land proved exaggerated. The monk and his forty followers landed without opposition on the shores of Britain. They sent to announce themselves as a solemn embassage from Rome, to offer to the King of Kent the everlasting bliss of heaven, an eternal kingdom in the presence of the true and living God. To Ethelbert, though not unacquainted with Christianity, for, by the terms of his marriage, Bertha, the Frankish princess, had stipulated for the free exercise of her religion, there must have been something strange and imposing in the landing of these peaceful missionaries on a shore still constantly swarming with fierce pirates, who came to plunder or to settle among their German kindred. The name of Rome must have sounded, though vague, yet awful, to the ear of the barbarian. Any dim knowledge of Christianity which he had acquired from his Frankish wife would be blended with mysterious veneration for the pope, the great high-priest, the vicar of Christ and of God upon earth. With the cunning suspicion which mingles with the dread of the barbarian, the king insisted that the first meeting should be in the open air, as giving less scope for magic arts, and not under the roof of a house. Augustine and his followers met the king with all the pomp which they could command, with a crucifix of silver in the van of their procession, a picture of the Redeemer borne aloft, and chanting their litanies for the salvation of the king

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and his people. "Your words and offers," replied the king, are fair; but they are new to me, and, as yet, unproved; I cannot abandon at once the faith of my Anglian ancestors." But the missionaries were entertained with courteous hospitality. Their severely monastic lives, their constant prayers, fastings, and vigils, with their confident demeanor, impressed more and more favorably the barbaric mind. Rumor attributed to them many miracles. Before long the king of Kent was an avowed convert; his example was followed by many of his noblest subjects. No compulsion was used, but it was manifest that the royal favor inclined to those who received the royal faith.

The British Church, secluded in the fastnesses of Wales, could not but hear of the arrival of the Roman missionaries, and of their success in the conversion of the Saxons. Augustine and his followers could not but inquire with deep interest concerning their Christian brethren in the remote parts of the island. It was natural that they should enter into communication; unhappily they met to dispute on points. of difference, not to join in harmonious fellowship on the broad grounds of their common Christianity. The British Church followed the Greek usage in the celebration of Easter; they had some other points of ceremonial, which, with their descent, they traced to the East; and the zealous missionaries of Gregory could not comprehend the uncharitable inactivity of the British Christians, which had withheld the blessings of the Gospel from their pagan conquerors. The Roman and the British clergy met, it is said, in solemn synod. The Romans demanded submission to their discipline, and the implicit adoption of the western ceremonial on the contested points. The British bishops demurred; Augustine proposed to place the issue of the dispute on the decision of a miracle. The miracle was duly performed-a blind man brought forward and restored to sight. But the miracle made not the slightest impression on the obdurate Britons. They demanded