Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/291

Rh EARLY INSTITUTIONS.] ENGLAND 277 and &amp;gt;eow are plainly morked. Of the theyn, in the earliest code of all, there is no mention. We have mention also of the classes intermediate between the freeman and the slave, the Icct namely and the esne. But we see no signs of a society containing men of distinct nationalities ; there is nothing answering to the mention of the Romans in the codes of the continental Teutons, or to the mention of the Welsh in other English codes which were drawn up at a The wer- later time and under other circumstances. The first gild. English laws are drawn up for a purely Teutonic people, keeping their old Teutonic customs. Two of the most characteristic features of ancient English law are there in their fulness. Every man has his value ; but his value differs according to his rank. Every freeman s oath is worth something ; but the oath of the earl is worth more than the oath of the churl. Death or injury done to any man has its penalty ; but the penalty is higher or lower according to the rank of the person injured. In short, in all the early codes, in England and elsewhere, the state has already stepped in to regulate and modify the natural desire for vengeance on the part of the injured person or his kinsfolk. The natural avenger of the slain man seeks for the blood of the slayer ; the state steps in and persuades him, in Teutonic England no less than in Homeric Greece, to accept of a money payment instead of the gratification of his vengeance. The right of a man in a state of nature i he to do himself justice with the strong arm, i&fcehde or feud fcuhde. the source of the private war and the duel of later times is not wholly set aside ; but it is regulated and modified, and confined to certain extreme cases. The state in all such cases steps in as a mediator between the wrong-doer and the man who seeks to avenge himself upon the wrong doer. It takes the right of punishment out of his hands into its own. The later legal doctrine that a wrong done to any member of the community is a wrong done to the com munity itself, and to the king as its head, has not yet been reached. A. crime done against the king is more heavily punished than a crime done against another man; but that is simply because the king fills the highest place in the long gradation of ranks. The first notion of a crime against the state as such seems to come out in that venerable enact ment which looks like the origin of one branch of our modern privilege of parliament &quot; If the king his people to him call, and to them then man evil do. twofold bot and to the king fifty shillings.&quot; The The language, the laws, and the constitution which the Teutonic English settlers in Britain brought with them from their it igion. ] t | er }j omes W ere in the course of ages to undergo many changes ; the newer forms were to part away widely from the older ; but all was to be gradual growth, gradual change ; there was to be no sudden revolution, no supplanting of one tongue by another tongue, of one law by another law. But the English had brought with them from their older Loin es another possession which was to pass utterly away, a system which was to be thoroughly supplanted by a rival system of foreign birth. With their language and their laws they had brought with them their religion ; and while their language and their laws were to abide, their religion was to pass away. The old religion of the English was, like their language and their laws, that form of the common Aryan heritage which had grown up among the people of northern Germany. The old Teutonic faith is best known to us in the poetry and legends of that branch of the race which clave to it longer than the rest, in the Eddas and Sugas of the Northmen of Scandinavia. Our system was doubtless essentially the same as theirs, though, as it was laid aside by both High and Low Germans earlier than it was in Scandinavia, it may never have reached among them the same full poetic development which it reached in more northern lands. The names of the chief gods, Woden, Thunder, 1 Frigga, and the rest, are the same with only dialectic differences. The name of one of our old gods is of special interest ; the great Aryan power of the sky, Zeus himself, appears among us, though with lessened honours, under the English form of Tiw. He, with his fellows, gives his name to a day of the week ; and his name, like that of his fellows, may be traced in the local nomenclature of our laud. Of that laud the Teutonic gods took full possession along with their worshippers. The creed of the Roman aud the Briton passed away with those who pro fessed it. The still unconquered Welsh never thought of undertaking the work of missionaries among the conquerors and destroyers of their brethren. And they would have had small chance of being hearkened to by those conquerors and destroyers, if they had undertaken such a task. It was otherwise when a new light came from lands beyond the sea, between whose people and ours there reigned no such mutual scorn and hatred. And abore all things, it was otherwise when the call to a new faith came directly from the capital of the western world. The English folk were first called on to cast aside the faith of Woden and to embrace the faith of Christ by men who came on that errand from Rome herself, at the bidding of the acknow ledged father of Western Christendom. The conversion of the English to Christianity was not Conver- only one of the great turning-points in the history of siou of England ; it was one of the great turning-points in the ^ ^ / lg history of Christianity itself. It was, as far at least as the chris- West is concerned, a conversion of a kind that was tiauity. altogether new. Christianity is historically the religion of the Roman empire ; wherever the influence of Rome, East or West, has spread, there Christianity has been dominant ; beyond that range it has taken little root. The Teutonic conquerors of the continental provinces accepted the religion of the empire as they accepted its laws and language. At the end of the sixth century, all the subjects, all the western conquerors of Rome, were Christian. Heathendom took in only the lands, like Scandinavia and Germany beyond the Rhine, which had never formed part of the empire, together with the one Western land which had wholly fallen away from the empire. The conversion of England was the first strictly foreign mission of the Western Church. It was the first spiritual conquest of a people wholly strange, a people who stood in no kind of relation to Rome aud her civiliza tion. It was the first act of a long seiies of spiritual con quests which gradually brought all Europe within the pale of the Church. And it was more than the first act of the series ; it enlisted in the missionary work the people who were to send forth the most successful apostles to other lands. The conversion of England directly led to the conversion of heathen Germany and Scandinavia. Gregory, who was so anxious for the soul of Trajan, was himself a spiritual Trajan, enlarging his spiritual empire by conquests more lasting than the earthly conquests of Trajan himself. The conversion of the English to Christianity carried with it the readmission of Britain into the general world of Europe. Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries the notices of the afl airs of Britain in continental writers are rare and meagre beyond expression. They show that Britain had fallen back into the isolation of the days before Cajsar ; it had again become an unknown world, a world about which any kind of fable might be safely uttered. Such rare intercourse as that world had with the Roman world was through the Teutonic masters of Gaul, the Franks. Aud it may be taken as a sign that, in the latter 1 punaer, punor, iu modem form Thunder, is the true English name. Tbe more familiar form Thor is, like most Scandinavian forms, a contraction. Thiusduy is for ty