parts which we expect in a modern edifice, and which external symmetry, after all, contributes much more, perhaps, to the amusement of the beholder than the accommodation of the inhabitant.* However much the Saxon spirit may, according as party spirit urged, have been now embellished or now toned down,† yet it cannot be gainsaid that therein did the tree of English liberty strike root, and that it is accordingly of most ancient growth. England is the home of imperishable institutions. "There is nothing more wonderful in the history of our constitution," says May, "than the stability of each institution which comprises a portion of the political system, despite the constant and continuous changes which many institutions, in relation to power, influence, and privilege, incessantly undergo." "What other country in the world," asks another writer, "is there, at this moment, that is working its way with institutions that have been in action during the last two hundred years?" "The present constitution of our country is to the constitution under which she flourished five hundred years ago, what the tree is to the sapling-what the man is to the boy. The alteration has been great, yet never was there a moment at which the chief part of what existed was not old."§ No revolution has ever interrupted the continuity of the English law the revolutions of 1641 and 1688 broke out in order to protect, by fresh safeguards, the laws existing, and not to originate any mere speculative law of recent conception. When again, in 1649, with the death of Charles, the monarchy lapsed for a while, the English polity was not shaken to its centre by the fall; the administration of justice and government retained their forms and went their wonted course. Even when the Civil War raged hottest, the twelve judges were accustomed to go their halfyearly circuit without let or hindrance. The basis of the English Commonwealth thus remained unmoved, while the topmost summits were swaying hither and thither.|| The Saxon constitution was founded on a free peasant community, with a king at the head, hereditary only upon condition. The characteristic element of this constitution is the great solici *Paley, vol. iv. p. 373. + Brougham, Constitution, 131. Parl. Rememb. iv. 1. § Macaulay, Hist. Eng. De Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 321. tude accorded to the administration of the law; and the civil regulations affecting personal security. In perfect accordance with this principle is the system of frank-pledge and the administrative division into counties, hundreds, and tithings. The political organization of the Anglo-Saxon peasant class constitutes the social groundwork of this division, inasmuch as the Saxons in England, as in Germany, settled down in separate granges, and not in town-like villages. The underlying character of the Saxon polity was of a federal nature: migrating from seven kingdoms, the subdivisions built up fresh confederations, which did not, however, relinquish dependence upon the general body. William the Conqueror deduced, it is true, his pretended claim from the will of Edward the Confessor; but never was any nation more completely led under the yoke by another, than the AngloSaxon after the battle of Hastings. The property of the Saxons who fell at Hastings, or fled from the battle-field, as well as of those who had betaken themselves to Harold's standard, was confiscated.* All of Saxon race were subjected to tallage, and frequently those who were liable to such assessment were hired out to the barons. The Saxon women became the spoil of the conquerors, and even the Saxon saints were not respected.† To many women the lands of their fallen husbands were granted for life, but out of sheer compassion only; to one Saxon woman was thus accorded the usufruct of her husband's property, but merely on condition of her feeding the king's hounds. The Norman victors perpetrated, moreover, every kind of enormity; at William's coronation they set fire to London, Geoffrey of Mandevil acting with equal ruth at Cambridge. Even in the year 1124 a Saxon chronicler thus lamented: "God seeth the poor people borne down most pitiably; first robbed of possessions and then massacred: it was a miserable time." Hence it is a wild fiction to assume that, because William styled himself the "purchaser," and not the conqueror of England, he had any reverential regard for Saxon freedom. As far as the Conqueror was concerned, never did there exist a more absolute monarchy than his; he alone had the right to originate laws, and hence his power of inflicting punishment was almost unbounded. i. 326. Thierry, Conquète de l'Angleterre, The Greatest of all the Plantagenets, p. 5. He apportioned the conquered and confiscated estates amongst his feudal dependents; the Saxons possessed of any land were forced to hold it from the victors on feudal tenure, becoming their sub-feudatories. The feuds of the greater vassals were scant enough, however, according to the continental notion. The jurisdiction of the barons was narrowed down to penal cases of a lower grade, and to civil disputes of a petty nature: no manorial court could carry into effect a judgment otherwise than through the sheriff, through an officer of the crown consequently, and from every court-baron appeal lay to the king's court. William did not recognize in his nobles any exemption from taxation; from their lands he compelled his vassals to discharge the same assessments which they had been wont to afford in the time of the Confessor. The distinctive characteristic of the Norman kings was their exceeding greed, and the administrative system was so directed as to insure the exaction of the highest possible imposts. From this bent originated the great registration that William caused to be taken of all lands, whether holden in fee or at rent; as well as the census of the entire population. The respective registers were preserved in the cathedral of Winchester, and by the Norman were designated "le grand rôle,” "le rôle royal," "le rôle de Winchester;" but by the Saxons were termed "the Book of the Last Judgment," "Doomesdaege Boc," "Doomsday-book." In consequence of this compilation the Normans themselves were subjected to the arbitrary taxation that was levied; and, as they had no faithful sub-feudatories, were fain to submit to the burthen. The equipoise maintained between the Normans and the Saxons renders it further apparent that William I. succeeded in carrying out unimpeded one of the greatest of political revolutions. In the general assembly, held at Salisbury in 1085, William caused not only the vassals "holding in chief" to tender the oath of fealty, but also their tenants; thus breaking in upon the feudal compact in its most essential attribute-the exclusive dependence of a vassal upon his lord-he substituted his own authority over these sub-feudatories, establishing himself thereby as "Lord Paramount."* This great fact, the qualified ownership of the vassals, *Hallam, Middle Ages, ii. 315; Thierry, ii. 156. The oath runs thus: "De cette heure en avant, je deviens votre homme liège de ma vie et de mes mem bres; honneur et foi porterai en tout temps pour la terre que je tiens de vous; qu'aiusi Dieu me soit en aide!" coupled with the protection which the Saxons found against their petty tyrants under the sway of the tyrant at large, was productive of this result, that the absolute monarchy of William I., though still cramped in feudal forms, embodied already a State according to the modern conception. Hence it was that neither the dynasties of Germany, nor the greater barons of France, ventured to lift the standard of revolt in England; the sense of public tranquillity that prevailed affording but poor chance for such a venture. Any private quarrel which was not adjusted before the civil courts was regarded as a "breaking of the king's peace." The English barons did not consequently succeed in raising themselves to the position of independent princes; nor did they, as in France, remain unswerving antagonists to the body of the nation. The despotism of William and of his successors should be hailed as the progenitor of liberty and of equality before the law; the nobility, oppressed alike with the Saxons, found at last a tower of strength in the laws of the down-trodden natives. William had confirmed the laws of Edward the Confessor, by which we are to understand simply the customary law of the Anglo-Saxons. So far as this law did not come into conflict with the feudal rights of the Normans and the power of the king, so far, accordingly, as private law and municipal administration were concerned, it was respected.* William Rufus and his successors were frequently entreated to recognize these "bonæ leges Edwardi Confessoris," and they always readily confirmed, it is true, the people's law, although persistently violating it in its political bearings. As the ownership of land could only pass by inheritance in accordance with feudal law, all landed property being held feudally, the Norman law in this respect prevailed over the Saxon customary law. The law of the people, on the other hand, became, even to the victors, a safeguard against their superior lord; and hence the law "common" to every class. By degrees, also, the victors adopted the language of the vanquished. The Lord's Prayer contains sixty-five Saxon words out of sixty-nine; of the eighty-one words in Hamlet's monologue but thirteen are taken from the language of the conquerors.‡ While the Norman kings, and the first Plantagenets, intent upon rendering their subjects tractable, were imparting quickening *Thierry, ii. 38. Bucher, Parlamentarismus, 72. Phillipp's Englische Rechtsge schichte, 183. life to the Saxon municipal and executive organization—and in no land has the unity of the state more completely existed than in the England of that day-while all the power of legislation, civil jurisdiction, and state government centred in the king and his officials, the latter being, in sooth, frequently taken from the communal body; France, on the other hand, was nothing but a vast confederacy, based on the feudal bond, and endowed with a central hereditary authority.* While the greater Norman barons enjoyed but a restricted seignorial power, and petty civil jurisdiction, the greater French vassals were, in truth, lords of the soil, having power of life and death, the privilege of coining money and of taxing the Jews. They enjoyed the right to protest against the nomination of any bishop who might not be to them a "persona grata," and power to make laws binding on all residing within their territory. While in England the newly-invigorated Saxon commonalty was organized into an array of stout-hearted infantry against hostile invaders; France retained, as the feeding-stream of her army, the knightly bands of her noble barons.† At Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt, it was not merely one embattled host bearing down another, but the modern State-craft achieving its conquest over the feudal polity. The mere framework of the feudal system still endures, as it must be owned, in England: so far, however, as feudal polity converts political power into a private law, making of the king a mere lord of vassals, invested with right and power similar with his own, it never found an embodiment in the land. Summing up the fundamental characteristics of Norman State-craft, they may be thus enumerated: absolute monarchy; centralization in the strictest sense; the revival of spontaneous action in the commonalty, so far as needful for the maintenance of peace; the prevention of private warfare, and of a domination of robber-knights like that which prevailed in Germany. Such kingly despotism, weighing with equal heaviness on all the subjects, evoked, some 150 years after the battle of Hastings, a spirit of union in the entire community. The barons who, at Runnymede (Runningmead), on the 16th June, 1215, wrested from John Lackland the great Charter, "Magna Charta libertatum," * Warnkönig, Französische Rechtsgeschichte, i. 205. + During the reign of Henry V. the Council established that the usual pro portion of archers to men-at-arms, or lances, was three archers to one lance. -Nicolas ii., 331; iii., 135. |