Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/410

Rh {|
 * Oxfordshire
 * 22
 * 40
 * 60
 * Buckinghamshire
 * 18
 * Bedfordshire
 * 12
 * 20
 * Huntingdonshire (4 double hundreds)
 * Northamptonshire
 * 30
 * Cambridgeshire (excluding the Isle of Ely)
 * 15
 * 60
 * Hertfordshire
 * 15
 * Middlesex
 * Total
 * 120
 * }
 * 30
 * Cambridgeshire (excluding the Isle of Ely)
 * 15
 * 60
 * Hertfordshire
 * 15
 * Middlesex
 * Total
 * 120
 * }
 * 15
 * Middlesex
 * Total
 * 120
 * }
 * Total
 * 120
 * }
 * Total
 * 120
 * }
 * 120
 * }
 * }

Similar reorganisation was also carried through further east: for in East Anglia and Essex we can also trace artificial hundred schemes, Essex in 1066 having twenty hundreds and East Anglia sixty, distributed in the proportion of 36:24 between Norfolk and Suffolk. In Essex, it would seem, there was also a new assessment of hidage, but not in East Anglia, perhaps because that province had not been actually conquered by force.

Another side of government, to which Aethelstan gave much careful attention, was the better maintenance of the peace as inculcated in his father's dooms. His laws on this head in fact, for their date, are very comprehensive, and it is interesting to find him relying on the feudal relation of lord and man as one means of securing good behaviour. He laid it down, for example, that all lordless men were to be compelled by their kinsmen to find themselves lords, and that the lords were to be responsible for producing their men, if charges were preferred against them. As one doom expressed it, every lord was to keep his men in his suretyship (fidejussio) to prevent thieving; and if he had a considerable number of vassals, he was ordered to appoint a reeve (praepositus) in each township to look after their behaviour. Another device adopted in Aethelstan's day with the same object was the so-called "frithgild," or peace association. This system was set up in the Chilterns and Essex by the advice of the bishops of London and Dorchester and the reeves in those dioceses, but it was also used in other parts. It consisted in grouping men together by tens and hundreds, the members of each group or frithborh being mutually responsible for each other's acts, and liable to be fined collectively if one of the group committed a wrong and defaulted. The importance of these new expedients is evident, but it must not be supposed that any attempt was made to apply them uniformly all over the realm. One law indeed was published prescribing a uniform coinage and fixing the number of moneyers for various towns; but it is clear that in the Five Boroughs and in the north Aethelstan as a rule let things alone, and was content to act mainly through the leading Danes who naturally maintained their own customs. For example, in spite of the fact that much of the king's time was devoted to organising shires and hundreds in the south, the more northern Danish provinces preserved their own analogous organisation into "ridings" (i.e. "third parts") and "wapentakes," their reckoning