Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/112

 98 /. BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST them aright. It is altogether misleading to speak of them as codes, or as if they were intended to be a complete expo- sition of the customary law. We pass on to the substance of Anglo-Saxon law, so far as capable of being dealt with in a summary view. There were sharp distinctions between different conditions of per- sons, noble, free, and slave. We may talk of " serfs " if we like, but the Anglo-Saxon " theow " was much more like a Roman slave than a medieval villein. Not only slaves could be bought and sold, but there was so much regular slave- trading that selling men beyond seas had to be specially for- bidden. Slaves were more harshly punished than free men, and must have been largely at their owner's mercy, though there is reason to think that usage had a more advanced standard of humanity than was afforded by any positive rules. Manumission was not uncommon, and was specially favoured by the Church. The slave had opportunities (per- haps first secured under Alfred) for acquiring means of his own, and sometimes bought his freedom. Among free men there were two kinds of difference. A man might be a lord having dependents, protecting them and in turn supported by them, and answerable in some measure for their conduct ; or he might be a free man of small estate dependent on a lord. In the tenth century, if not before, every man who was not a lord himself was bound to have a lord on pain of being treated as unworthy of a free man's right ; " lordless man " was to Anglo-Saxon ears much the same as " rogue and vagabond " to ours. This wide-spread relation of lord and man was one of the elements that in due time went to make up feudalism. It was not necessarily associated with any holding of land by the man from the lord, but the association was doubtless already common a long time before the Conquest, and there is every reason to think that the legally uniform class of dependent free men included many varieties of wealth and prosperity. Many were probably no worse off than sub- stantial farmers, and many not much better than slaves. The other legal difference between free men was their estimation for wergild, the " man's price " which a man's