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 166 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap xxxviii which they had subdued. After the sanguinary Barbarians had secured their dominion, and gratified their revenge, it was their interest to preserve the peasants, as well as the cattle, of the unresisting country. In each successive revolution, the patient herd becomes the property of its new masters ; and the salutary compact of food and labour is silently ratified by their mutual necessities. Wilfrid, the apostle of Sussex, 158 accepted from his royal convert the gift of the peninsula of Selsey, near Chichester, with the persons and property of its inhabitants, who then amounted to eighty-seven families. He released them at once from spiritual and temporal bondage ; and two hundred and fifty slaves, of both sexes, were baptized by their indulgent master. The kingdom of Sussex, which spread from the sea to the Thames, contained seven thousand families ; twelve hundred were as- cribed to the Isle of Wight ; and, if we multiply this vague com- putation, it may seem probable that England was cultivated by a million of servants, or villains, who were attached to the es- tates of their arbitrary landlords. The indigent Barbarians were often tempted to sell their children or themselves into per- petual, and even foreign, bondage ; 159 yet the special exemptions which were granted to national slaves 160 sufficiently declare that they were much less numerous than the strangers and captives who had lost their liberty, or changed their masters, by the accidents of war. When time and religion had mitigated the fierce spirit of the Anglo-Saxons, the laws encouraged the frequent practice of manumission ; and their subjects, of Welsh or Cambrian extraction, assumed the respectable station of in- ferior freemen, possessed of lands and intitled to the rights of civil society. 161 Such gentle treatment might secure the allegi- 158 See the mission of Wilfrid, &c. in Bede, Hist. Eccles. 1. iv. c. 13, 16, p. 155, 156, 159. 159 From the concurrent testimony of Bede (1. ii. c. i. p. 78) and William of Malmsbury (1. iii. p. 102) it appears that the Anglo-Saxons, from the first to the last age, persisted in this unnatural practice. Their youths were publicly sold in the market of Rome. 160 According to the laws of Ina, they could not be lawfully sold beyond the seas. 161 The life of a Wallus, or Gambricus, homo, who possessed a hyde of land, is fixed at 120 shillings, by the same laws (of Ina, tit. xxxii. in Leg. Anglo-Saxon, p. 20) which allowed 200 shillings for a free Saxon and 1200 for a Thane (see likewise Leg. Anglo-Saxon, p. 71). We may observe that these legislators, the West-Saxons and Mercians, continued their British conquests after they became Christians. The laws of the four kings of Kent do not condescend to notice the existence of any sub- ject Britons.