Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/289

Rh EAKLY INSTITUTIONS.] ENGLAND 275 euure laud. ok- nd. royal power, and the growth of the importance of the thegnhood, naturally went hand in hand. A power like that of kingship, when once established, is sure to grow. It is specially sure to grow in a period of conquest. The king and his personal followers are likely to be foremost in warfare ; and each increase of territory increases the power and dignity of the king, and therewith raises the condition of his followers. We see the institution of thegnhood in full force at an early stage of the Teutonic settlement in Britain. We may feel sure that the Teutonic settlement in Britain greatly served to strengthen it. And we cannot doubt that the change from the nobility of office to the nobility of birth greatly affected the position of the churl or simple freeman. By breaking down a barrier which was purely a barrier of birth, it made it easier for individual churls to rise to a higher rauk. But by gradually confining office and power and influence to the king s personal follow ing, it tended to degrads the position of the churls as a class. This relation of a man to his lord might be on any scale. It might be contracted between men of any rank, between a weaker and a more powerful king, between a poorer and a richer churl, or between men of any of the intermediate ranks. In its higher degrees the relation was political ; in its lower degrees it was purely social. It spread alike up wards and downwards, till it became the rule and not the exception. It came to be looked on as the business of every man to seek a lord, and at last the lordless man had legal disadvantages. Still tbe relation between a man and his lord, the voluntary commendation of a man to his lord, was in itself a relation purely personal, and had nothing to do with the holding of land. But the two things might easily be brought into connexion with one another. And as the practice of commendation grew, analogous changes gradually affected the tenure of land. In both cases the personal relation grew at, the expense of the public relation. The community lost, and the individual gained. The land of a Teutonic community is primarily the property of the community itself. It is folHaiul, ager publicns, the land of the people. But here, as everywhere else, private property in land gradually arose ; that is, the community granted out parts of the common possession to its individual members. The pictures of Cresar and Tacitus show that, in the time between them, the institution of private property in land had already made some advances. When it has once begun, it is sure to advance. It would specially advance with every conquest ; each man would claim to have his personal share of the soil which he had helped to win. Thus, alongside of tbefolkland, the land of the community, grew up the private estate, the edel, odal, or allod. This is land which is a man s very own, the gift of the community, held according to the laws of the community. It is not the gift of this or that man, owing any service to this or that man. As the king s power grew, as he came to be looked on more and more as the representative of the community, the land of the com muuity came step by step to )d looked on as his land. In the six hundred years between the English conquest of Britain and the Norman conquest of England, iQ/olJdand, the ager publicns, passed into terra regis, the land of the king. As the community could at all times grant away its own land, the doctrine gradually grew that the king, the head of the community, could grant it away also. In the first stage he granted it only with the assent of the com munity ; in a later stage he came to dispense with that assent. Land thus booked, granted by a written document, to whomever the king would, but of course mainly to his personal followers, became bookland. The lord was the giver of bread to his man, and the land of the community was the noblest form of bread that he could give him. And, as things went on, he might sometimes grant him more than the land itself. The primitive community, great or small, from the township to the nation, had the rights of a commun ity; it had judicial and administrative powers. From thosa powers it might be deemed a privilege for the royal grantee to be exempted. He might be clothed with exceptional judicial powers within his own lauds ; the next stage would be for those powers to spread themselves over the lands of his neighbours, The privileged landowner within a com munity might grow to be the lord of t ne community. The township might grow into the lordship ; its free assembly might grow into the court of the lord ; the land itself, so much of it as escaped the lord s clutches, might be declared to be held under the lord. In the fictions of lawyers things are commonly turned about. The exception is declared to be the rule, and the rule to be the exception. If the com munity contrives to save any fragments of its ancient rights from the grasp of the Jord, those fragments are at last judi cially declared to be held only by the lord s grant. If no grant can be found in real history, legal ingenuity will be ready to assume one. All land was by immemorial custom burthened with three duties. To the repair of bridges and the repair of fortresses all land was bound to contribute. And the duty of every member of the community to serve in arms when called on for the defence of the community was so far a charge upon the land that a certain amount of land had to supply a certain number of men. But this is not military service in the later sense ; the laud is not held of a lord by a military tenure ; the personal duty of serving in the fyrd, the militia of the community, is not a duty paid by the man to his Jord, but by the member of the community to the community itself. The primitive militia of the com munity and the personal following of the lords form two distinct elements, which often appear as distinct in the records of early warfare. The strictly military tenure, the holding of land from a lord on condition of doing him military service, does not concern us as yet. The English settlers in Britain thus brought with them all the elements of Teutonic society as they stood in their day. The distinction of earl, churl, and theoiv went on in Teutonic Britain as they had gone on in Germany from time immemorial. Marks, hundreds, gas, arose on the conquered soil of Britain, as they had already arisen on the ancestral soil of Germany. But the circumstances of the conquest could not fail to hasten the process by which the smaller communities were gradually gathered into the larger. That the gentfs settled by marks is plain from nomenclature ; and, much as in Greece the same Doric tribes helped over and over again to found distinct Doric settlements, so settle ments of the same gens formed in distant parts of England bore the same name. The gens of the Weltingas, for instance, appears at Wellington in Somerset, at Wellington in Shropshire, and at Wcllmgborough in Northamptonshire. But the mark never could have had the same importance in England which it had in Germany. Such a settlement could never maintain itself alone in a country which was being conquered bit by bit. Every settlement must from the beginning have relied on the help of its neighbours, alike for further conquests and for the defence of what it had already won. Everything mu.st have tended to closer union among the communities which grouped together to form the hundred, the gd, and the kingdom. The gd must, from the first, have been the lowest group capable of real separate being. And in Wessex at least, each gd, as it was formed, was placed under the rule of an under-king of the royal house. In central England the gas, each doubtless under its separate king or ealdorman, often remained really distinct, till they were swallowed up by the growing power of Mercia. All these groups, greater and smaller, mark or town- Origin uf manors. The trinoda necessi- tas. Influence of the insular conquest.