Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/290

Rh 276 ENGLAND [HISTOEY. Greater ship, hundred, gd or shire, and kingdom, kept the and less- constitution of the primitive community, modified by crassem- 8UC ] 1 changes as change of circumstances could not fail blte3 to bring with them. So far as we can get any glimpses of any of them, we see in all alike the same elements. There is in all the presiding chief, the leading men propos ing and debating, the whole body of freemen saying yea or nay to their proposals. The chief change was one of the highest practical moment, but which was not the result of any sudden revolution, or even of any enacted law. Democracy may change into oligarchy by the mere working of the laws cf time and space. The simple freeman may have the same right to appear in the assembly of the king dom which he has to appear in the assembly of his own town ship. But he is far from being so likely to be found there. Mere distance settles the question. Only tho more wealthy and the more zealous will go long journeys to take a part in public affairs. Thus the assembly, popular and unlimited in its theoretical constitution, silently narrows till it becomes an assembly of the chief men, with such only of the common freemen as live near the place of assembly or are drawn to it in greater numbers than usual on some occasion of special excitement. The assembly of the king- The TF#- dom, the Witenagemot or Meeting of the Wise, gradually ena- took this character. There was no need to shut the mass gemot. o f ^ e people out ; they shut themselves out. In the Scircfem6t, the assembly of the shire, we see the working of the same law. Attendance has to be enforced by law ; at least a minimum number for each district is fixed. This practically comes to confining the assembly to those who are specially summoned ; for a special summons to certain members is always found to lead in the end to the ex clusion of those who are not summoned. In this way. without any formal change, by the mere working of natural causes, the popular character of the primitive assemblies died out. It died out of course more thoroughly in the higher assemblies than in the lower. The great assembly of the kingdom, in theory the gathering of all the freemen of the kingdom, shrank up into an assembly of the king s thegns, subject to the appearance of more numerous bodies of men on specially stirring occasions, and to the presence of the citizens of the town where the assembly was held, when it was held in a town. This will always happen whenever the assembly of a large country is primary and not representative. The more purely democratic its consti tution, the more sure is it to shrink up into oligarchy. But it is well to remember that, as long as our national assem blies kept any traces of their primitive shape, those great meetings which chose and deposed kings, which made and repealed laws, which made war and peace, were, in theory at least, meetings not of this or that class, but of the nation. English In the last paragraph we have been carried on somewhat towns, beyond the date which we had reached in our narrative, somewhat beyond the period of heathen England. In so doing we have incidentally made mention of towns. The origin of the English towns certainly comes within the period with which we are immediately dealing. Than that origin no part of our subject is more obscure. But one negative point we may assert with full confidence ; there is No in- no trace of any possession, of any law or custom or office, heritance which the cities and boroughs of England have inherited from from the older municipalities of Rome. Whatever likeness may be seen between the two is due, beyond all doubt, not to direct derivation, but to the eternal law according to which like causes produce like results. In the primitive Teutonic system, in the system reaching from the mark up to the kingdom, there was no place for walled towns. The early Teuton looked on the walled town as a prison. When in after times strictly English towns arose, their position .was wholly different from that of the Roman towns. The Rome. Roman town was the centre and mistress of everything within its own range. The city was a commonwealth ; the surrounding country was little more than a subject district. Without a city there could, in Greek and Roman ideas, be no organized political or social life. In the Teutonic system, on the other hand, towns were wholly unknown, and they have never in any Teutonic country come to fill the place which they have always filled in southern Euiope. The difference between English social life and that of the southern part of the European continent, the shrinking of the English upper classes from town life in any shape but that of the capital of the kingdom, dates from the very be ginning of our history. In southern Europe the city is an essential of life; in England it is a kind of accident. When English towns did arise, they were simply districts where houses stood thicker together than elsewhere. The town was a mark, a hundred, perhaps a shire, in which more men lived within a smaller space than they lived in other marks, hundreds, or shires. But the question here arises, When did the English conquerors of Britain begin to occupy walled towns at all 1 It is certain that in many cases the Roman town was simply forsaken by its English conquerors. At Pevensey and Silchester the inhabitants were slaughtered, and the walls left standing e^ipty for ever. It is equally cer tain that in other cases, as at Bath and Chester, the Roman walls, after standing empty for a while, in the case of Ches ter for the ascertained period of three hundred years, were again inhabited by settlements of Englishmen. The ques tion is whether this last was the case with all the Roman sites which were won during the time of heathen conquest and which became English towns in later times, or whether any of them were continuously inhabited, and simply passed from British to English occupiers, It is quite certain that in some cases the period of desolation, if there was any, must have been short. If London, Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Colchester, ever stood void and forsaken, they must have been settled afresh very soon. Some at least of them were again inhabited cities at the end of the sixth century. London and York, above all, would doubtless hold out long after all the surrounding country had been subdued. They may have held out till the conquerors had laid aside some what of their first rudeness, and had learned to see that a city and its walls were a valuable possession. In some then of the greatest cities we may believe that their con quest was comparatively late, and that, when they were conquered, they immediately became dwelling-places of the conquerors. It may then well be that there never was a moment when the walls of Eboracum, the walls of Augusta the old city once called London and afterwards to be called London again ceased to gird in the dwelling-places of man. The point is that the connexion between Eboracum and Eoforwie, between Augusta and Luiulcnlyrig, is a con nexion purely geographical. The Briton went out, and the Englishman came in. The rulers and the people of the Teutonic commonwealth had no political succession from the rulers and people of the Roman commonwealth which had once occupied the same soil. Of English law during this time we have no contemporary oid-Er monuments. But law in its first form is the same as list la 1 custom; the earliest written codes are simply the customs of the time set down in writing. W T e have no written English laws till after the introduction of Christianity : the oldest written code bears the name of the first Christian king. But the dooms of ^thelberht, and the dooms of much later kings, are, in all those points which are not clearly modified by Christianity, good evidence for the laws or customs of heathen times. Our oldest laws set before us a society in which the position of the king is well marked, and where he summons his people to him, doubtless to ths general assembly of his realm. The classes of eorl, ceorl,