fatal fight and bring the lender into trouble. The early notion would be
that a weapon used for manslaying should bring home the liability with
it to the owner, quite regardless of any fault; which would afterwards
become a more or less rational presumption that he lent it for no good
purpose. Then the risk of such weapons being forfeited continued even
to modern times. Hence the armourer who takes a sword or spear to be
repaired, and even a smith who takes charge of tools, must warrant
their return free from blood-guiltiness, unless it has been agreed to
the contrary.[55] We also find, with regard to the forfeiture of things
which “move to death,” that even in case of pure accident, such as a tree
falling on a woodman, the kindred still have their rights. They may take
away the tree if they will come for it within thirty days.[56]
There was not any law of contract at all, as we now understand it. The
two principal kinds of transaction requiring the exchange or acceptance
of promises to be performed in the future were marriage and the payment
of wergild. Apart from the general sanctions of the Church, and the
king’s special authority where his peace had been declared, the only
ways of adding any definite security to a promise were oath and giving
of pledges. One or both of these were doubtless regularly used on solemn
occasions like the settlement of a blood-feud; and we may guess that
the oath, which at all events carried a spiritual sanction, was freely
resorted to for various purposes. But business had hardly got beyond
delivery against ready money between parties both present, and there
was not much room for such confidence as that on which, for example,
the existence of modern banking rests. How far the popular law took
any notice of petty trading disputes, such as there were, we are not
informed; it seems likely that for the most part they were left to be
settled by special customs of traders, and possibly by special local
tribunals in towns and markets. Merchants trafficking beyond seas, in any
case, must have relied on the customs of their trade and order rather
than the cumbrous formal justice of the time.
Anglo-Saxon landholding has been much discussed, but is still imperfectly
understood, and our knowledge of it, so far from throwing any light on
the later law, depends largely on what can be inferred from Anglo-Norman
sources. It is certain that there were a considerable number of
independent free men holding land of various amounts down to the time
of the Conquest. In the eastern counties some such holdings, undoubtedly
free, were very small indeed.[57] But many of the lesser free men were
in practical subjection to a lord who was entitled to receive dues and
services from them; he got a share of their labour in tilling his land,
rents in money and kind, and so forth. In short they were already in
much the same position as those who were called villeins in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries. Also some poor free men seem to have hired
themselves out to work for others from an early time.[58] We know next
to nothing of the rules under which free men, whether of greater or
lesser substance, held “folk-land,” that is, estates governed by the
old customary law. Probably there was not much buying and selling of
such land. There is no reason to suppose that alienation was easier
than in other archaic societies, and some local customs found surviving
long after the Conquest point to the conclusion that often the consent
of the village as well as of the family was a necessary condition of a
sale. Indeed it is not certain that folk-land, generally speaking, could
be sold at all. There is equally no reason to think that ordinary free
landholders could dispose of their land by will, or were in the habit of
making wills for any purpose. Anglo-Saxon wills (or rather documents
more like a modern will than a modern deed) exist, but they are the wills
of great folk, such as were accustomed to witness the king’s charters,
had their own wills witnessed or confirmed by bishops and kings, and
held charters of their own; and it is by no means clear that the lands
dealt with in these wills were held as ordinary folk-land. In some cases
it looks as if a special licence or consent had been required; we also
hear of persistent attempts by the heirs to dispute even gifts to great
churches.[59]
Soon after the conversion of the south of England to Christianity,
English kings began to grant the lordship and revenues of lands, often
of extensive districts, to the Church, or more accurately speaking to
churches, by written charters framed in imitation of continental models.
Land held under these grants by charter or “book,” which in course of
time acquired set forms and characters peculiar to England, was called
_bookland_, and the king’s bounty in this kind was in course of time
extended to his lay magnates. The same extraordinary power of the king,
exercised with the witness and advice[60] of his Witan, which could
confer a title to princely revenues, could also confer large disposing
capacities unknown to the customary law; thus the fortunate holder of
bookland might be and often was entitled not only to make a grant in his
lifetime or to let it on such terms as he chose, but also to leave it
by will. My own belief is that the land given by the Anglo-Saxon wills
which are preserved was almost always bookland even when it is not so
described. Indeed these wills are rather in the nature of postponed
grants, as in Scotland a “trust disposition” had to be till quite lately,
than of a true last will and testament as we now understand it. They
certainly had nothing to do with the Roman testament.
Long before the Conquest it had become the ambition of every man of
substance to hold bookland, and we may well think that this was on the
way to become the normal form of land-ownership. But this process,
whatever its results might have been, was broken off by the advent of
Norman lords and Norman clerks with their own different set of ideas and
forms.
The various customs of inheritance that are to be found even to this
day in English copyholds, and to a limited extent in freehold land, and
which are certainly of great antiquity, bear sufficient witness that at
least as much variety was to be found before the Conquest. Probably the
least usual of the typical customs was primogeniture; preference of the
youngest son, ultimogeniture or junior-right as recent authors have
called it, the “borough-English” of our post-Norman books, was common
in some parts; preference of the youngest daughter, in default of sons,
or even of the youngest among collateral heirs, was not unknown. But
the prevailing type was equal division among sons, not among children
including daughters on an equal footing as modern systems have it.
Here again the effect of the Norman Conquest was to arrest or divert
the native lines of growth. In this country we now live under laws of
succession derived in part from the military needs of Western Europe in
the early Middle Ages, and in part from the cosmopolitan legislation of
Justinian, the line between the application of the two systems being
drawn in a manner which is accounted for by the peculiar history of
our institutions and the relations between different jurisdictions in
England, but cannot be explained on any rational principle. But the
unlimited freedom of disposal by will which we enjoy under our modern law
has reduced the anomalies of our intestate succession to a matter of only
occasional inconvenience.
Small indeed, it is easy to perceive, is the portion of Anglo-Saxon
customs which can be said to have survived in a recognisable form. This
fact nevertheless remains compatible with a perfectly real and living
continuity of spirit in our legal institutions.
If we do not nowadays observe King Alfred’s dooms, or anything like them,
still we owe it to the work of Alfred and his children that England was
saved to become an individual nation, and that our fundamental ideas of
justice have survived all external changes. Those ideas may be summed up
very shortly. Justice is essentially public; the business of parties is
to conduct their cases according to the rules of law, the business of the
court is to hear and determine between them, not to conduct an inquiry;
judicial interpretation of the law is the only authentic and binding
interpretation, and in particular the executive has no such power. These
principles appear obvious to most of us, but there are many civilised
countries where they are not admitted. We can trace them back to the
rudest beginnings of our jurisprudence; they are as vigorous as ever,
in all the complexity of modern affairs, wherever the English tongue is
spoken.
ALFRED AND THE ARTS
BY REV. W. J. LOFTIE
ALFRED AND THE ARTS
The story of the life of King Alfred connects his name with the practice
of three arts. He was an architect, a writer, and a musician. We so
often hear of the art of war that when we remember his proficiency as a
soldier we are inclined to forget that fortification, fighting, fishing,
and hunting, if they may be called arts, are not fine arts. Alfred’s
noble defence of England against the Danes has ever since his day been
an example to his countrymen of later generations. He first taught them
the negative virtue that consists in not knowing when they are beaten.
But our concern, in the particular chapter that has fallen to my lot,
is with Alfred and the fine arts: and as you cannot enjoy painting or
music without a house, it behoves us to inquire first as to the state of
architecture in the ninth century, and as to the part taken by Alfred in
building houses, churches, and cities. We must remember that though, as
we know, writing and the illumination of manuscripts had attained a very
high pitch of excellence, Alfred had no maps to guide him. His workmen
may have been able to scratch their diagrams on stones, and in other
similar ways to obtain guidance in carrying out such buildings as the
king required. But he had traversed all that part of England over which
he reigned, and was as well acquainted with the marshes of Somerset as
with the wooded valley of the Lea and the chalk cliffs of his southern
shore. He knew how to build and how to handle the ships of his time, and
was able to defeat the Danes on what might be called their own element.
Tradition has always and plausibly assigned to him a further feat of
naval warfare. When his enemies had sailed up to Hertford and prepared
to rest for the winter and mend their boats, he, so to speak, drew the
water from under them by the knowledge which prompted him to divide the
channels. The object of this and other achievements of the kind was
his anxiety to obtain the command of the great estuary into which the
Fleet, the Wallbrook, the Lea, and the creeks about Barking fell. To gain
this region was one thing, to hold it another. The Saxons before his
time disliked the use of walls in warfare. Still more they disliked the
trouble of building and maintaining them. But Alfred possessed whatever
was known of fortification, and by this knowledge he was able to raise
the first permanent impediment in the way of future invaders.
The best authorities agree that to Alfred rather than to the Romans
must be ascribed the foundation of London as it was during the Middle
Ages, and as, in a sense, it is still. Stow, as far back as the reign
of Queen Elizabeth, citing some long-lost document or tradition, tells
us that Alfred found London empty. He, to use a very modern expression,
“restored” the walls. He rebuilt them with the material at hand, namely,
the material with which another Saxon king had built the church of St.
Alban. The Saxons had disdained to fight behind walls in their conquest
of the degenerate and Romanised Britons. But the Danes were as fighting
men equal to the Saxons. Some advantage was needed before the Saxons
could overcome their formidable invaders. He saw two important points to
be gained by the restoration of London: first, that his new city would be
virtually impregnable by the Danes; secondly, that the situation would
be that from which he could best defend the whole valley of the Thames.
As the Thames rises in Gloucestershire, and runs thence to Essex and
Kent, this was to defend all his English dominions. We say now that to
hold the Nile is to hold all Egypt and much more. In those days, when the
river was the chief highway, to protect the Thames was to protect Kent,
Wessex, and Mercia. I have mentioned hunting as an art. Alfred had an eye
for a hunting country, as we say now. London was seen by him as we see
Pevensey, a ruined wall enclosing nothing. There may have been vestiges
of a church. There may have been the piers of a bridge. There can have
been little else. Alfred made the bridge into a fortress, renewing the
great timbers which had connected the piers. The bridge stood a long way
farther down the stream than the modern London Bridge, and to defend it
the king built a tower at the south-east corner of the restored wall.
William the Conqueror, like Alfred, saw the advantages of the site, and
here he placed the tower which still stands, a relic of his reign, a
reminiscence of that of his great predecessor. The Roman roads through
the city, and the gates by which they made their exit, no longer existed,
or, at best, were ruined and useless. He made one road diagonally from
the bridge across his market-place to Westgate, which we know as Newgate.
A second road led to what we still call Bishopsgate, some distance
westward from the site of a Roman gate which opened on the old roads to
Lincoln and into Essex. His corn-market, where there was a weighing-stone
for wheat, stood to the west of the Market Place or Cheap. A road along
the northern side of the Cheap was in existence so soon after Alfred’s
time that it must have been planned if it was not made by him. We call
it Cheapside, and here there are traditions of a king’s palace near the
spot where, centuries later, the great men of the city began to assemble
in their Guildhall.
We have mentioned Alfred’s wall. His outline, we may be sure, was
speedily filled up. St. Paul’s Church rose among the wooden and brick
houses. Civic institutions began to show themselves where there was
security; and Alfred’s brother-in-law, Burgred, the last King of Mercia,
had a house in Coleman Street, and gave the cabbage garden to the Bishop
of Worcester. Alfred’s daughter, Æthelflæd, married Æthelred, Burgred’s
successor, who was called the Alderman of the Mercians. To him, and after
his death to his widow, the king committed the charge and governance
of the city, and Æthelbert became the first alderman of London. The
importance of the place is apparent. It was the easternmost bulwark of
Alfred’s kingdom against the settled Danes of East Anglia, as well as
against the fresh incursions of pirates and filibusters from over the
sea. Alfred’s prescience is proved by one single fact. From that day to
this London has never been taken by force of arms. The Danes from the
North Sea never got past the Tower—the Danes from the Danelaw never broke
through the wall.
With regard to ecclesiastical architecture in Alfred’s time we know very
little; with regard to civil architecture scarcely anything. The church
of St. Lawrence, Bradford-on-Avon, is assigned by competent judges to as
late a date as the ninth century; but Aldhelm, who was Bishop of Sherborn
near the beginning of the seventh century, founded a nunnery at Bradford,
which was afterwards connected with that of Shaftesbury, and the church
is mentioned as early as the time of King Æthelred, just a hundred years
after the death of Alfred. Building-stone of the best kind abounds in
the neighbourhood, as well as in that of Deerhurst, near Tewkesbury. The
stone masonry suggests that wooden buildings set the pattern in both
places: while, from the ease with which St. Paul’s in London was burnt,
both before and after the Norman Conquest, we may be sure it contained
very little brickwork. Deerhurst was built in 1053, so we must not look
to it as an example of the architecture of Alfred’s time. At Wing, near
Aylesbury, the chancel is Saxon, and not unlike St. Lawrence’s chapel
in its peculiar flat panelling. It is very lofty, but less narrow in
proportion than Bradford, and has a series of very interesting vaulted
crypts, in which we see a good many thin bricks of the kind usually
ascribed to the Romans, fragments perhaps of a Roman fortress or a
villa at that place. Several towers with early Saxon features remain,
but many have lately been destroyed, as at St. Albans, Limpsfield, and
other places. A few fragments of Beda’s time may possibly remain in the
very ancient church of Jarrow. Saxon building with Roman bricks is to be
seen at St. Martin’s, Canterbury, and at Dover, but both falsified by
injudicious alterations. Where good building-stone comes to the surface,
as in Northamptonshire, we find not far apart examples of churches and
towers which may well have existed at the beginning of the tenth century.
Barnack and Earls Barton may be named, and with them should be classed
St. Michael’s at Oxford, and St. Benedict’s at Cambridge. Traces of Saxon
work are often found in old churches, but they can seldom be dated in the
age of Alfred. It may, in fact, be laid down as a rule that where there
were no fortifications, building was of but a temporary character, and
where stone did not greatly abound, churches were made of wood and were
very perishable. In a few places towers were built specially, like the
Irish round towers, for storage and defence. In these cases we usually
find great height in proportion, and an arrangement of the entrance so
that it can only be reached by a ladder, such as we may still trace in
the Tower of London, the keep of which had no entrance on the ground
level before the reign of Henry VIII. Of dwelling-houses we see no
examples. In London, as much as two centuries later, ordinances were made
for the improvement of town dwellings, but that previously this branch
of architecture had been sadly neglected we may infer from reading that
even chimneys were usually made of wood.
We know that castles were built by Alfred, and in his time, but in
a majority of cases they consisted only of mounds and stockades,
strengthened by great beams and balks of timber. To withstand attacks
like those of the Danes, sudden and usually brief, these defences may
have been very powerful. At a few places like Tamworth, where some
supposed Saxon masonry is still pointed out, or at Colchester, where, as
at London, Roman walls were restored, a little building took the place
of woodwork. Mr. Clark, the best authority about _Medieval Military
Architecture_, says plainly that though “the English were from a remote
period conversant with masonry, and constructed churches of stone or
timber as suited them best,” they avoided everything but timber where
they made a mound or an artificial earthwork of any kind. The Norsemen
from the mouth of the Elbe were not very different from the Danes and
the Saxons, Jutes and Angles were only earlier immigrants from the same
regions. It is not possible now to distinguish the earthworks thrown up
by Alfred and his men from those of the Danes which they overthrew. One
thing only we can recognise as his peculiar work, namely, the formation
in his own mind of clearly devised plans by which, with inferior
strength, with fewer men and arms, and in face of frequent disaster, he
was able to consolidate his power, to turn even defeat into success, and
at last, before his early death, both to obtain a time of respite for his
people and to show them how in the future they might always hopefully
resist the invader. If the Danish attack was for the moment overwhelming,
it was desultory. The defence offered by Alfred was far-seeing, part of a
consistent whole, a scheme which must eventually prevail.
In 876 the pirates attacked Wareham successfully, and thence fell upon
Exeter: but in 878 Alfred made his famous camp in the Somerset marshes,
and by slow degrees drove them northward and eastward, established
himself in London, and fortified it, thence expelling them from
Gravesend, from Rochester, from Farnham, from their great timber fort
at Benfleet, until Hasting, the Danish leader, in 893, submitted to
Alfred and was converted and baptized. Finally, in 897 the war was over.
The Danes had thrown up a work “on the Lea, twenty miles from London,
whereupon Ælfred,” says Mr. Clark, “threw up another work on each bank
of that river lower down, and diverted the waters through a number of
shallow courses, thus effectually shutting in the Danish ships.” From
this time to the end of his life, a brief period of about four years,
Alfred devoted himself to the arts of peace. Among them he reckoned
ship-building and the codification of the laws, but we chiefly remember
his love of books, his establishment of schools, in which writing was
practised as a fine art, and his encouragement of skilful work in gold,
enamel, and inlay.
Many examples remain to show us that art of this last kind, as well as
poetry and music, were largely and successfully practised among the
Anglo-Saxons. The great discoveries in grave mounds in Kent, of which the
results may be seen in the Mayer Museum at Liverpool, prove that from
a very early period there were among the people skilful designers and
artificers, not only in jewellery, but in glass. The well-known ornament
preserved at Oxford, probably a royal badge, which bears his name, is
perhaps the most familiar object which can be connected with him. We may
remember of Alfred, as well as of King Edwin of Northumbria and of other
law-loving monarchs, that he hung up gold bracelets by the wayside, and
that none dared to steal them. Unfortunately for another story connecting
Alfred with the fine arts, it is not older than the twelfth century. The
fact that such a legend existed shows us what was the popular estimate of
the king’s character. We are glad therefore to observe that Freeman finds
nothing impossible in the story that “Alfred, wishing to know what the
Danes were about and how strong they were, set out one day from Athelney
in the disguise of a minstrel or juggler, and went into the Danish camp
and stayed there several days, amusing the Danes with his playing, till
he had seen all that he wanted, and then went back without any one
finding him out.” Alfred’s dealings with the Danes, whether in disguise
or otherwise, led to the defeat and conversion of Guthorm, to the peace
of Wedmore, and to two incidents in which pictorial art has a place: the
capture of the Raven standard, and the cutting of one of the figures of
a horse on the side of the chalk downs. There are two such white horses,
one near Edington, which has been “restored,” the other near Shrivenham,
“which has not been altered at all, but is very old and rude, so that you
might hardly know that it was meant for a horse at all.”