He sought not to make new laws of his own devising, "when it was unknown to him what of them would be liked by those who should come after him," but gave all his efforts toward the re-invigoration, so far as circumstances permitted, of the primitive institutions.1 It cost a fierce struggle to maintain this polity against enemies within, a still fiercer struggle to maintain it against enemies without. From a station in the west of England once, as the train paused for a moment, I looked across a league or more of country, to where a hill sloped steeply up from the plain. Standing out against the deep green turf could be seen in clear outline the white figure of a horse, each detail remarkably perfect from the distance at which it was beheld. A thousand years or more had passed since the surface soil had been scraped away, allowing the chalk substratum to appear through in the gigantic delineation; for it is said to have been done by the hands of Alfred's Saxons, victorious close by over an army of Danes. But the Danes were not always vanquished, and at last succeeded in seating upon the English throne princes of their own stock. Closely allied with the Saxons though they were in blood, tongue, and institutions, attachment to the ancient order seems to have been less deeply stamped in their grain; and under their domination may be observed the threatening progress of an innovation which was destined before long to supersede utterly, to all appearance, Anglo-Saxon freedom. Each heretoga had had, from the earliest times, as we have seen, his gesith, or comitatus, the Influence of the Danes. 1 Taswell-Langmead: English Constitutional History, p. 43. company of warlike youths who followed his banner, devoting to him their labor and valor, while they received in return from him entertainment and protection. In the time of the Danes it became clear that the gesith was the germ of a growth so portentous as the feudal system. In the wars, at this time especially sharp, the ceorls were forced to "commend" themselves in great numbers to thegns, receiving protection in return for service, now with the ploughshare, now with the spear, in the fitful alternation of peace with strife. Thus the ceorls sank from the condition of pure freemen and became bound to soil and lord. The change by no means involved an entire destruction of their old rights: they retained their land free as against all men but their lords, and continued to regulate their own affairs as before in the moots of tun, hundred, and shire.1 There was a liability, however, as never before, to interference, a liability that increased; for the hour of feudalism was at hand. In the time of dalism. Edward the Confessor the air was full of change. The popular elements of the polity were becoming more and more depressed; the great thegns, dependents of the Sovereign, pushed aside or quite superseded the ancient ætheling; the witenagemote became more and more a royal council, to which gathered only the great officers of the realm. Nevertheless, a remnant of the old order remained. When the witan had elected the King, it was not felt that the action was confirmed until the ring of citizens at Westminster or Winchester had shouted their acknowledgment about the coronation chair. At Edward's death, the nation Incipient feu 1 Green Short History of the English People, p. 245. exercised its sovereign right to choose a ruler to its mind, passing by the next of kin as inefficient, going even beyond the royal line, to place the crown on the brow of Harold. More than all, quite beneath the surface, as it were, each village-moot discussed and voted, and from each went forth the representatives to speak for their townsmen in the larger sphere. In dark centuries that were to come, men often recalled with fondness the laws of Edward the Confessor, and demanded their restoration. We reach now an event so important in the history of Anglo-Saxon freedom that it will be in place to give it careful consideration. CHAPTER III. THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS. 1066. the field of THERE is a little patch of a square mile or so, in the midst of the rich Sussex landscape in England. Through it, in low ground, sluggishly Present apflows a small brook, and from the brook pearance of ridges slope up gently on either hand. It Senlac. is covered for the most part with the green, thick English grass, dotted now and then by old elms and oaks. A gray, half-ruined wall, toothed with battlements at the summit, runs along one verge of the field; and there are two or three old towers, forlorn, through desertion and decrepitude, as Lears, whose comforting Cordelias are masses of close-clinging ivy, wall and towers suggesting a splendor that has now departed. What happened there in October, 1066, decided some important things; for instance, that in the sentence that is now being written there should be nineteen words of Saxon origin and four of Latin; and that in general, when we write and talk, about a quarter of our speech should be derived from Rome, and three-quarters from the German forests. It was decided there, in fact, that those of us of English blood are what we are in mind and body, a cross, namely, between two tough stocks, each of which contributed precious qualities of brain and brawn to form a race which in the nineteenth century should stand so high. The field is that of Hastings, where the Normans under William beat the Saxons under Harold. Thence came a blending of tongues; thence a blending of traits on the one hand enterprise, on the other sturdy fortitude - into a national character, too full of spring to break, too hard to be wasted, as carbon and iron blend together into steel. The beach at One day, at the end of September, I stood on the beach at Hastings, a watering-place of some fashion on the south coast of England. It was Hastings. a slope covered with rough shingle, close upon one edge of which crowded the blocks of the modern town, and on the other, the waters of the English Channel. On the summit of a high cliff to the eastward was the ruin of a Norman castle cliff and ruin so in sympathy through a long community of stormy exposure, that the turf and rock of the downs seemed to rise into the moss and masonry with scarcely a perceptible dividing line. In front lay in the motionless air the wide glassy level of the Channel, with the horizon line blotted out by the afternoon haze. Coasters lay at anchor off the beach, somewhat dim, with their sails hanging slack. There was a sound of oars from pleasure-boats, and as I stood on the beach, the sailors came up and pressed me to row with them. Close by, among the many promenaders, a Sunday-school from an interior village was holding a picnic. A day or two before, it was in 1870,the Prince Imperial from France, with the Empress, just driven from Paris, had landed in Hastings from Normandy in great distress. Mother and son were |