Different grades can be made out obscurely among these dependents, liberi homines, sokemen, cotarii, bordarii, and thrall; but the Norman lord Serfdom. was disposed to depress all into one class, - that of serfs, bound to the soil, and under obligation to render service. Nevertheless, the primitive fundamental organization was not obliterated. Towns now were growing rich and important, and at this time preserved the traditions of Teutonic liberty more perfectly than the shires; for the burgesses, in the case of the larger ones, had a moot answering to the shiremoot, and also a moot of the ward answering to that of the hundred or wapentake. In the case of smaller boroughs scattered through the provinces, the constitution was that of the hundred rather than the township. The condition of the serf was not utterly without hope; for if he could but obtain admission into a merchant-guild or club, and remain for a year and a day unclaimed by his lord, he was free. The practice of trial by jury strengthened now the impulse toward freedom. Stubbs derives it from the Franks, with, perhaps, some distant relationship to the Roman law. Though introduced at the conquest, it does not, until Henry II, become a settled institution. Henceforth, however, there lay upon every common man the liability to act as a judge, even in cases of life and death. To do such service fell within each man's experience, perhaps to do it many times. How salutary the discipline, even though the wisest decision may not be always reached! Trial by jury. The ancient freedom, therefore, was by no means dead beneath its superincumbent burden, but simply oppressed and hidden. It needs no long searching to find it in the days when feudalism was heaviest, and in the great thirteenth century, at the first opportunity it gives plain manifestation of itself. With the last Accession of year of the twelfth century we reach the John. important reign of John, which was ushered in by a circumstance full of good omen. At the coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as if the neglect of duty and rapacity of Richard I had shown the need of a reassertion of the ancient safeguards, declared that the right to reign comes to no man by birth, but is conferred by election, which the nation makes after invoking the Holy Ghost. On the 4th of August, 1213, a national council took place at St. Albans, to assess damages done to the church, in which not merely bishops and barons were present, but each township on the royal demesne sent its representatives, the traditional reeve and four men. Here, for the first time, we have historical proof of the summoning of representatives in any shape to the national council. It was, without doubt, intended that they should appear merely as witnesses; but it was important. For the last two or three reigns the divided nation had been growing together. French and Anglo-Saxon were blending fast into one speech; conquerors and conquered were becoming mutually interfused with one another's blood; community of perils and interests was bringing about an interchange of sympathy. At last, with the loss of Normandy, the circumstance ceased to exercise an influence which till now had caused the conquering race to feel a divided patriotism. Like the conquered, they were to have no land henceforth but England, and high and low extended hands to one another as had not been done before. We reach at length the 15th of June, 1215. Runnymede. Whoever stands on the great round tower of Windsor Castle, has under his eyes one of the most interesting landscapes of the world. The fairest part of England is spread out under his feet, through which winds the Thames eastward to where, on the horizon's edge, the bank of cloud and smoke marks the site of London. Not a point of the view but causes a thrill through great associations. The old tower here marks the churchyard of StokePogis, where Gray wrote his Elegy. The group of buildings close at hand are Eton school, where, for four hundred years, the privileged boys of England have taken their start as they grew up, so many of them, into great historic figures. The landmark yonder stands on a field once bloody, where the Red and White Roses clashed. The chapel at your feet holds the tombs of Tudors, of Stuarts, and of the house of Brunswick. There is no spot, however, in the wide prospect, upon which the eyes of thoughtful men are likely to rest longer, than a patch of bright green grass, seen among the darker foliage of a forest, at the distance of a league or so, a spot which still bears the name of Runnymede. Here the tyrant John was forced to meet his Barons and grant to them Magna Charta. To extort it was "the first act of the united nation, - the Church, the Barons, and the Commons, for the first time thoroughly at one. It is in form only the act of the King; in substance and historical position, it is the first effort of a corporate life that has reached its full consciousness, re solved to act for itself, and able to carry out the resolution. The whole constitutional history of England is little more than a commentary on Magna Charta." 1 Analysis of The Great Charter 2 contains a summing up of the rights and duties that had been growing into recognition, while the nation was growing into Magna Charta. consciousness. The Commons are joined with the Barons in the execution of the Charter, and now, for the first time since the overturn of the old order, take part in the great life of the nation. It is in the form of a royal grant, but is really a treaty, which John had no idea of keeping, between him and his subjects, based on a series of articles drawn up by them. The Barons maintain the right of the whole people as against themselves as well as against the King. The rights of common men are as carefully provided for as those of the nobles; for always when the privilege of the simple freeman is not secured by the provision which affects the high-born, an added clause defines and protects his right. The whole advantage is secured for the common man by the comprehensive article which closes the essential part of the Charter. The XIIth, XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth articles are those most interesting. No tax is to be exacted without a grant from the common council of the realm; and the sense of the nation, with regard to the tax, is to be taken in a duly summoned assembly. This claim was not at all new, but the right had never before been stated in form so clear, and the statement startled even the Barons. 1 Stubbs: Constitutional History, I, p. 532. The struggle for it did not end here, the claim not being fully conceded and firmly established until the close of the century. The nobles, as regards those below them, are bound here in the same way as the King. The XXXIXth and XLth clauses are famous and precious enunciations of principles. In these the right to be tried by his peers is secured to every freeman. This, too, was no novelty; the very formula used is probably derived from certain ancient laws; but the declaration was important. It is no new freedom, therefore, now for the first time appearing, but simply a coming up into consciousness again of the ancient right, and a revival of the old determination to make the right good.1 were work. It was probably through the clergy, the great Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, in particular, that the rights of the Commons-free- Langton's holders, merchants, even villeins so carefully regarded. These churchmen and their successors led and acted for the people until the Reformation, three hundred years after this time, with little jealousy of their growing influence, and it was the extinction of the influence of these natural leaders of the people, which caused the nation to fall so completely into despotic hands after the Wars of the Roses. It was in the North of England that the cry for freedom was first heard; but it was taken up at length by the baronial party in general, and the demands became definite under the hand of Langton, who followed in his redaction models of former times. In such fashion as they could, the masses of men, until now mute since the Conquest in all but local 1 The account of Magna Charta is summarized from Stubbs. |