THE LEGISLATION OF KING INE.
We have now nearly reached the end of the seventh century of our era,
and we may well take note of the fact that it was, not for England
only, a century of great religious change. The world-famous Hegira of
Mohammed happened in 622, when Edwin was reigning in Deira. Throughout
the reigns of the great kings at Bamburgh the invincible armies of
Islam were sweeping over Syria and Egypt, overthrowing the ancient
kingdom of Persia and for seven long years laying siege, all-but
successful siege, to Constantinople. It may be well for us children of
the Saxon to be reminded that our profession of Christianity is not
older than the Mussulman’s allegiance to the faith of the Prophet.
Our ancestors were idolators at the same time as the ancestors of our
Mohammedan fellow-subjects in the east; the same century saw both our
own forefathers and theirs converted from polytheism to monotheism,
from chaotic Nature-worships to “the religion of a book”.
A very noticeable figure in the south of England at the close of this
century was Cadwalla, King of the West Saxons. The kingdom of Wessex
had fallen after the death of Cenwalh in 672 into dire confusion and
disorder. Cadwalla, who was descended in the fourth generation from the
great fighter Ceawlin, was one of the many claimants for the throne.
His first victories, however, were not won over any rival competitors
for the West Saxon crown, but over his South Saxon neighbours. Between
Wessex and Sussex there seems to have existed in these early centuries
an enduring blood-feud. The enmity was not likely to be lessened by
remembrance of the fact, already mentioned, that in 661 Wulfhere, King
of Mercia, had wrested the Isle of Wight and part of Hampshire from the
West Saxons and handed them over to his convert and godson, Ethelwalh
of Sussex. Against Sussex, therefore, Cadwalla, “that most strenuous
young man of the royal race of the Gewissas,” while still an exile,
about 685, directed the arms of the followers whom he had gathered
round him in the forests of Chiltern. He was at first successful,
slaying King Ethelwalh and laying waste the land of Sussex with cruel
and depopulating slaughter, but was repulsed by two ealdormen who acted
as regents after the death of the king. Just at this time, however,
Cadwalla seems to have made good his claim to the crown of Wessex, and
with the forces of the whole West Saxon kingdom now at his back, he set
himself to recover the lost provinces of Wight and the Meonwaras, and
at the same time to extirpate the idolatry which still lingered in that
conservative Jutish population. Herein he seems to have been abetted by
the zealous Wilfrid, who notwithstanding his friendship for Ethelwalh
was willing to work for the good of the Church with Ethelwalh’s
destroyer, and who received from him as the reward of his co-operation
one fourth of the 1,200 hides into which the Isle of Wight was divided.
King Cadwalla, though an apostle of Christianity, reflected, of course,
some of the barbarism of his age. There were two lads of royal blood
(brothers of the last king of Wight) who had escaped to the mainland,
but whose hiding-place was unfortunately discovered. Cadwalla, who had
been wounded in the wars and was resting for a time at a house not
far distant, ordered that the youths should be slain; but a certain
Cyniberct, abbot of the monastery of Redbridge, came to Cadwalla’s
bedside and made earnest intercession, not for the lives of the hapless
lads, but that before their execution “they might be imbued with the
sacraments of the Christian faith”. The request was granted. The two
young princes were converted and baptised, and when the executioner
made his appearance “they joyfully submitted to the temporal death by
which they doubted not that they should pass over into the everlasting
life of the soul”.
The war of Wessex with Sussex continued and soon brought in Kent also,
which came to the help of its southern neighbour. After two years’
ravaging of Kent, the king’s brother Mul, by some sudden turn of
fortune, fell into the hands of the men of that land (687), and they
in their rage and exasperation burned him and twelve of his followers
alive, a savage deed, which was like to have made a truceless war
between the West Saxons and the men of Kent. Strange to say, however,
this work of revenge was not long engaged in by the brother of the
victim. In the year 688, after little more than two years of bloody
reign, Cadwalla, stricken with satiety or remorse, went on pilgrimage
to Rome. He had two great desires: “to be baptised at the threshold
of the apostles and to be speedily freed from the flesh that he might
pass into eternal joy”. Both desires were granted. The devout Syrian
Pope, Sergius I., baptised him by the name of Peter on April 10, 689,
and on the 20th, while yet wearing the white robes of a catechumen, he
died of Roman fever. He was buried in the great church of St. Peter,
and a Latin epitaph in twelve elegiacs was carved over his tomb. The
meteoric career of “the most strenuous Cadwalla” who reigns and ravages
for two years and a half, and at thirty dies “in Christ’s garments” at
Rome, and is buried at St. Peter’s, forms one of the strangest pages in
Anglo-Saxon history.
Cadwalla’s successor, a remote kinsman named Ine, descended from
Cerdic, but not from Ceawlin, reigned for thirty-seven years (688–726)
over the West Saxons. In the sixth year of his kingship the blood-feud
with Kent was ended by a treaty under which the men of Kent bound
themselves to pay 30,000 coins of some kind (the denomination is not
clearly stated) for the murder of Mul. The West Saxon king seems to
have had but little difficulty in holding down Sussex, which before
the end of the eighth century altogether disappears from the list of
the kingdoms. He probably established some sort of protectorate over
Essex, since (apparently about 693) he calls Erconwald, Bishop of
London, “my bishop”. In 715 he fought with Ceolred, King of Mercia,
at Wodensburh.[82] As the result of the battle is not stated we may,
perhaps, infer that the victory was doubtful. The chief operations of
the West Saxon king seem, however, to have been on his Western borders
which were notably extended by him. In 710 he and his kinsman Nun, king
of the South Saxons, fought against Geraint, king of the West Welshmen,
and it was probably to mark and to secure the increase of territory
thus won that Ine built the fortress of Taunton in the valley of the
Tone.
On the other hand there were, as so often happened in the disorganised
West Saxon house, troubles with the king’s own kinsfolk. In 721 it
is said “Ine slew Cynewulf the Etheling”. In the next year, Ine’s
own queen, Ethelburga, appears as the demolisher of the newly raised
fortress of Taunton. Apparently, however, she was warring for, not
against her husband, and we may, perhaps, safely connect this entry
with those which immediately follow it: “Ealdbert went into banishment
into Surrey and Sussex, and Ine fought with the South Saxons,” and
(725) “Ine fought with the South Saxons and there slew Ealdbert the
Etheling whom he had before expelled from his kingdom”. If we are not
erroneously combining these scanty notices, Ealdbert an Etheling of
the royal house rebelled against his kinsman, seized the new fort of
Taunton, was besieged therein by the martial consort of Ine, and on the
storming of that stronghold fled into Sussex, where, three years after,
he was defeated and slain by the West Saxon king.
In 726, sated apparently with rule and strife and victory, the elderly
Ine followed the example of his predecessor, resigned the crown to a
kinsman--apparently a remote kinsman--named Ethelheard, and performed
the great pilgrimage to Rome, “desiring in this life to wander round
the neighbourhood of the holy places, that he might win a kinder
reception from the holy ones in heaven”. According to William of
Malmesbury[83] the king’s wavering and procrastinating temper was
definitely turned towards the Roman pilgrimage by the exhortations of
his wife Ethelburga who acted the following parable in order to give
weight to her words. It happened upon a day that the king and his court
left a certain _tun_ in which they had been dwelling with a profusion
of regal luxury. By Ethelburga’s orders the steward filled the rooms
of the royal abode with rubbish, allowed cattle to wander through it,
defiling its floors, and placed a sow which had just littered, in the
royal couch. Persuading the king, on some pretext or other, to go back
to the _tun_, she turned his natural surprise at the hideous change
into an argument for relinquishing the world. “Where, lord husband, are
now the pomps and delights of yesterday? Like a river hastening to the
sea is all the glory of man. As hath been the delight of our life here
so shall be our torments hereafter.” With these words and with the
sight of the squalid habitation, she persuaded him at once to perform
the great renunciation for which she had so long vainly laboured. The
death of Ine was apparently not so sudden or so dramatic as that of his
predecessor, but there can be no doubt that he died in Rome and never
returned to his native land.
The especial interest, for us, of the reign of Ine lies in the fact
that he was the first King of Wessex who published written laws for
the guidance of his subjects. Till his time such legislative activity
as existed among our ancestors had been confined to the kingdom of
Kent, where it had evidently been called into being by the organising
and civilising influence of the Roman ecclesiastics. “These are the
dooms which Ethelbert the king gave forth in Augustine’s days”: so runs
the title of the document which now stands first in the collection
of Anglo-Saxon laws. This document is little more than a schedule of
the fines to be paid for various offences committed. Though later
legislators are a little less dry and curt in their utterances, the
general character of their work is not greatly different. As with
most of the barbarian codes the repression of crime and the redress
of injuries is their first care. They say little about rights, much
about wrongs. The rules which guided the devolution of property, and
the various customs which made up “folkright” were, no doubt, deeply
engraved on the minds and hearts of the people, and it is not from any
formal enactment of a royal legislator, only from casual allusions to
them, that we have to learn their nature and their history.
After the death of Ethelbert, law-making activity seems to have
slumbered for two generations. Then about the year 680, Hlothere
and Eadric, who were apparently joint kings of Kent, put forth a
small collection of “dooms” adding some items to Ethelbert’s list of
offences and penalties. Eadric’s son, Wihtred, in the year 696, issued
another set of laws, dealing more with offences against morality and
religion--with adultery, Sabbath-breaking, the worship of devils,
the eating of flesh in Lent, and so forth. The strong ecclesiastical
influence under which Wihtred’s laws were framed is evidenced by the
preface which is to this effect: “When Wihtred the most gracious king
of Kent was ruling, in the fifth year of his reign (696), ... the 6th
day of October, in the place which is called Berkhamstead, there was
gathered together for counsel an assembly of great men. There was
Berwald, archbishop of the Britons, also Gybmund, bishop of Rochester:
and every rank of the churches of the land spake in concord with the
obedient people. Then did the great men with the consent of all men
‘find’ these dooms and added them to the law-customs of Kent, as is
hereafter said and spoken.”
The expressions used in this and many similar prefaces in the
collection of Anglo-Saxon laws indicate that which is probably
incapable of definition, the sort of share which the leading men of
Church and State had in the royal legislation. Laws are passed in
the name and by the authority of the king, but he is no uncontrolled
autocrat, and for any important change in the “law-customs” of the
people, the great men of the realm must share the responsibility.
We may now turn from the rather obscure and elliptical “dooms” of the
Kentish kings to the much fuller and more interesting laws of Ine
of Wessex which seem to have been promulgated about 693, a year or
two before those of Wihtred. Like the latter they were framed “with
the counsel and consent of my two bishops, Hedde of Winchester and
Erconwald of London, and of all mine ealdormen and the oldest _witan_
of my people and also of a great assembly of the servants of God”. “My
father Cenred” is also named among the royal advisers, thereby raising
a difficult question as to Ine’s accession to the throne while his
father was still living. The preface ends, “And let no ealdorman nor
any of our subjects after this seek to turn aside any of these our
dooms”.
As it is impossible to give here anything like a complete digest of
the Anglo-Saxon laws, we may leave unnoticed the ordinances for the
repression of crime--especially the crime of theft--which constitute
the larger part of the document before us, and may confine our
attention to those paragraphs which deal with the tenure of land and
with the ranks and orders in the West Saxon state.
In all the earlier stages of a nation’s life, before the people have
begun to flock into great cities, there is no subject of more vital
importance than the relation of the Folk to the Land. In the seventh
century in England this was doubtless governed chiefly by old unwritten
customs which needed not to be formally enunciated because they were
universally understood. Two precious sentences, however, in Ine’s
laws give us a glimpse of the agricultural life of that day, and,
combined with information drawn from other sources, enable us in some
measure to reconstruct the rural community as it then existed. “A
ceorl’s homestead[84] should be fenced in, winter and summer. If he
be unfenced and his neighbour’s beast rush in by the opening which
he has left, he shall receive nothing on account of [the damage done
by] that beast, but must drive it out and bear the loss” (§ 40). “If
ceorls have a common meadow[85] or other divided land[86] to fence,
and some have fenced their portion, others not, and [stray beasts[87]]
eat their common arable or pasture, then those who are responsible for
the opening shall pay the others who have fenced their portion for
the injury that is done and take such compensation as is due from the
[owners of the intruding] cattle” (§ 42).
This law shows clearly that we are here in presence of an institution,
the existence of which is proved by sentences of Tacitus, by
charters of Anglo-Saxon kings, by manor-rolls of many succeeding
generations down to the very last century, the so-called Open Field
System. This system was not socialistic nor what we understand by
the word communistic, and yet it may truly be described in terms
drawn from the life of to-day as a system which formed “a community
of shareholders”.[88] Such a community was settled, by what means,
peaceful or warlike, we need not inquire, on some land cleared,
perhaps, from the forest where they founded what we should call a
village, but what they called a _tun_ or a _ham_,[89] to which they
gave the name of their own little tribe or kinship. The memory of the
Yslings may have quite died out from suburban Islington, and Birmingham
is no longer the little Mercian _ham_ where once the Beormings
clustered, but there seems no sufficient reason to doubt that from some
such settlements as these sprang the numerous _tons_ and _hams_ which
dot the map of England and have given their names to a stalwart progeny
in America and at the Antipodes.[90]
In the village settlements thus formed, of course, the main business
of the inhabitants was agriculture, and this appears to have been
conducted mainly on the Three Field System in which the land that was
not reserved for pasture was put one year under wheat sown in the
winter, the next year under oats or barley sown in the spring, and the
third year lay fallow. Now the peculiarity of the Open Field System is
this, that instead of each owner having his own bit of land separate
from the rest, in which he could practise this rotation of crops by
himself, the community as a whole had three large districts undergoing
that rotation, and in each of these districts the _ceorl_ (as the
Anglo-Saxon village shareholder was called) had a number of separate
strips of land, as a rule not adjacent to one another, assigned to him,
and in the cultivation of these strips he was probably for ever helping
or being helped by the owners of the strips adjoining. The system
appears to us inconceivably complicated and absurd: it can hardly be
even understood without reference to a map[91] in which we see the
strips of varying width, but generally a furlong in length, lying side
by side for a while, and then in another group starting off at right
angles to their former direction, but always preserving this strip-like
formation. Looking on such a map we can better understand what King
Ine meant when he talked of the _gedal-land_ or divided land which it
was the duty of the ceorl owner to fence; since, obviously, if the end
of his strip abutted on the forest or on the pasture in which the cows
of the community were feeding, his carelessness in leaving it unfenced
would work annoyance and loss to many others besides himself.
The causes and the origin of this remarkable system are lost in
prehistoric darkness. It has been well said[92] that “it is the more
remarkable, because with all its inconveniences of communication,
all its backwardness in regard to improvements, all its trammels on
individual enterprise and thrift, all its awkward dependence of the
individual on the behaviour of his neighbours, it repeats itself over
and over again for centuries, not only over the whole of England but
over a great part of Europe”. One thinks that some idea of future
repartitions, some desire to prevent any one individual or family from
getting too strong a grip of the land, must have been at work here
as with the Germans in the first Christian century, of whom Tacitus
wrote: “They change their fields year by year, and there is still land
left over”.[93] To continue the previous quotation: “the system was
particularly adapted to the requirements of a community of shareholders
who were closely joined together in the performance of their work,
the assertion of their rights, the fulfilment of their duties and the
payment of their dues”.
If we now inquire what was the extent of the land thus strangely
divided which was generally owned in the seventh century by the
Anglo-Saxon ceorl, we shall find that the determining factor is his
ability to grapple with the necessary cultivation of the soil; or,
in other words, the size of his estate is expressed in terms of his
ploughing power. The normal English plough-team consisted of eight
oxen yoked two and two together; and the land which it was possible to
plough by such an ox-team was called in English a _hide_, in the Latin
of the later lawyers a _carucate_.[94] The extent of a hide was not
always precisely the same even in the earliest times,[95] and in later
times there are puzzling differences in its dimensions, but as a rule
it seems safe to estimate it at 120 acres.
If a husbandman had only two oxen (in which case he would generally
have to rely on co-operation with his neighbours to get his land
tilled) he could only hope to cultivate the fourth part of a hide. This
was called a _yard-land_ in Old English, or a _virgate_[96] in legal
Latin. An even smaller division was the _ox-gang_ or _bovate_ (the
eighth of a hide), which belonged to the husbandman who had but one ox
to contribute to the common ploughing.[97]
The question now arises, “What was the ordinary holding of the
Anglo-Saxon ceorl during the first ages after his settlement in the
land, and what was his social position?” The answer, of course, must
be mainly conjectural, but especially when we consider the language
of Bede, and his Anglo-Saxon translators, who use “family” as the
equivalent of “hide,” it seems probable that the hide, whatever its
dimensions may have been, was the normal holding of the ceorl in his
day, and all the indications derived from the history of the seventh
century seem to point to the conclusion that the ceorl was a free man,
proprietor of the land which he cultivated, liable to service in the
_fyrd_ or national army, and to certain ecclesiastical payments, but in
every other relation independent. Metaphors are dangerous things, but
we may probably with safety characterise the numerous and sturdy class
of ceorls as the backbone of the Anglo-Saxon community.
On the other hand, whatever the normal property of the ceorl might be,
it is certain that in the course of time holdings would be split up
and the size of proprietorships would vary. While some ceorls--as we
shall see later on--might become owners of as many as five hides and
thus “attain unto thegn-right,” many more would see their holdings
dwindle into virgates and bovates; perhaps even[98] the virgate or
yard-land would become the typical holding of the descendant of the
original ceorl-settlers. The owner of 15 acres or even of 30 acres in
those days when “intensive” cultivation was unknown, would not be able
to do much more than provide food for himself and his family, and in
a rough, undemocratic age would be deemed a person of little account
in comparison with the great thegn or the abbot of a wealthy monastery
who sat in the king’s council and affixed his cross to the king’s
charters. Thus we can easily understand how the _status_ of some, by no
means of all the ceorls might already towards the close of the seventh
century be slowly changing from absolute independence into ill-defined
subjection or payment of rent to some great neighbouring land-owner
whom he was learning to call his _hlaford_, or lord.[99]
Owing to the peculiar mode of its division the arable land of the _tun_
has attracted the largest share of our attention. It is not to be
forgotten, however, that surrounding the three great open fields which
at one time or another came under the plough, there was also a large
meadow in which there was “common of pasture” for the cattle belonging
to the members of the _tun_. Surrounding this, again, and disparting
one tun or ham from its neighbour, there would generally be found a
belt of forest-land, as to which we have some interesting utterances
from the mouth of the West Saxon legislator. The great economic use of
the forest, in addition to the provision of fuel, was its supply of
“mast” for the swine, whose flesh was an important part of the food of
the people. In the forty-fourth of Ine’s laws it is ordained that if
any one cut down a tree under which thirty swine could take shelter
he shall pay a fine of thirty shillings. In the twentieth law we are
introduced to “a foreigner or other stranger”--probably in most cases
a Welshman--pushing towards us through a trackless forest. “Comest
thou peaceably?” is evidently the question that rises to the lips of
the Saxon ceorl as he sees the figure in outlandish garb dimly moving
through the trees. If the stranger would dispel suspicion he must
either wind his horn or shout at frequent intervals; otherwise the West
Saxon may assume that he is a thief and either slay him or capture
and hold him to ransom. In the former alternative, however, he must
at once make the matter known and swear that he took the dead man for
a thief; otherwise he will be liable to judicial process at the hands
of the dead man’s kinsmen. Again,[100] if a man burns a single tree
in a forest, and is afterwards convicted, he shall pay the full fine
of sixty shillings, for “Fire,” says the law-giver, “is a thief,” a
secret, furtive creature that may do much mischief. But if a man goes
boldly into the forest and cuts down trees for his own use, he shall
be fined thirty shillings for the first tree so felled and so on up
to ninety shillings, but no more, however extensive may have been his
depredations, for “The axe is a tell-tale”. He could not have wielded
it so long in the forest without a ringing sound which should have
arrested the attention of the forester.
Of course there was an exception to the general law of the mutability
of holdings in the case of the house of the ceorl with the little bit
of land surrounding it. This, which we should call a homestead, was
called in Anglo-Saxon a _weorthig_, and the fortieth law (already
quoted) warned the ceorl that this must be kept always well fenced
winter and summer, and that if any gaps were left in the hedge
surrounding it he would have no claim against a neighbour for any
damage that might be done by that neighbour’s beast rushing in through
the opening.
The whole of the labour on the land of a ceorl who had the normal
holding of a hide would certainly not be performed by himself and his
family. We have frequent references in the laws to a servile class,
generally known as _theows_, but sometimes--chiefly in the laws of
the Kentish kings--as _esnes_. We may conjecture that this class was
originally formed for the most part out of vanquished Britons spared
by their conquerors; probably also from among the descendants of yet
earlier strata of population, enslaved by the Britons themselves. It
was certainly recruited by the so-called _wite-theows_, men probably
originally of the class of ceorls, who having committed some crime
and being unable to pay the pecuniary penalty for their offence were
condemned to penal servitude, and in such a case generally forfeited
the freedom of their descendants as well as their own. Probably the
larger number of theows were in bondage to land-owners of higher rank
than the ceorl, but one of the laws of Ethelbert of Kent[101] shows
that at any rate the possession of a slave by a ceorl was not a thing
altogether unknown. Our information as to this servile class is,
however, very imperfect, and relates chiefly to the floggings to which
they may be subjected for various offences.[102]
Though the position of the great body of the ceorls, if it has been
rightly stated here, was that of partners in a free and independent
agricultural community, it must be admitted, as previously said, that
we have already in the laws of Ine traces of another, probably an
increasing class of _gafol gelders_ or rent-payers. Land in these cases
was held by free men under a lord, to whom payments had to be made in
kind whenever the lord visited the tenant. In Saxon Britain, as in
Frankish Gaul, the king and his chief nobles lived on the produce of
their estates, not by drawing half-yearly rents and converting them
into money, to be spent in their own distant palaces, but by moving
about from _tun_ to _tun_, from _vill_ to _vill_, and calling upon
their tenants for supplies of food which were consumed upon the spot
by themselves and their retainers, doubtless with much wassail and
jollity. From an estate of ten hides the lord was entitled to claim
ten vessels of honey, three hundred loaves, twelve _ambers_ of Welsh
ale, thirty _ambers_ of clear ale, two full-grown oxen or ten rams, ten
geese, twenty hens, ten cheeses, a full _amber_ of butter, five salmon,
twenty pounds weight of fodder, and a hundred eels.[103]
From the consideration of the middle and lower classes of Anglo-Saxon
society we ascend to consider the rather difficult questions connected
with the higher ranks of that society, the thegns, the eorls, the
ealdormen, about whom the Laws and the Chronicles inform us. In this
examination we should be left in almost hopeless darkness were it
not for two institutions both well known in all the collections of
primitive Teutonic law, and both very repugnant to our modern ideas of
justice, _wergild_ and (so-called) _compurgation_.
The essential principle of the _wergild_ was compensation in money
to the kindred of a murdered man, in order to induce them to abstain
from righting or avenging themselves by force. Far back in the dimmest
ages of the Teutonic foreworld the historical student discerns a
period when all wrongs were avenged by the stroke of the broad-sword.
The right, and more than the right, the sacred duty, of vengeance was
handed on from father to son, and the circle widened from kinsman to
kinsman, till the terrible blood-feud was like to destroy a tribe or
even a nation. Then at some period far back in the ages, the idea was
conceived of exorcising the spirit of revenge by the wand of pecuniary
compensation. Let the relatives of a murdered man receive a _wer_, a
payment in money, proportioned to his rank and position in the tribe,
and, the family honour being thus satisfied, let them forego the right
to revenge. If the injury were something less than death--if it were
maiming, mutilation, the abduction of a wife, unprovoked words of
insult--a proportionate payment in the nature of _wer_ was made to the
sufferer himself. The _wer_ was purposely fixed high according to the
value of money in those days, and if the offender were unable to pay
it, he and sometimes his family with him became the bondslaves of the
injured party. There was thus an element of prevention as well as of
compensation in the punishment inflicted. But in all this we do not
find any thought of punishment inflicted by the state to avenge the
injured majesty of the law; nothing of that feeling which now makes the
murder of the most degraded outcast a matter which must be inquired
into with the utmost diligence by the police and punished by the hands
of the executioner. This thought was indeed in some degree expressed by
the _wite_ or fine for murder, breach of the peace and so on, which was
paid to the king or to one of his officers, but this fine was generally
less in amount and always less in importance than the venerable wergild
payable to the kindred.
The amount of _wergild_ was elaborately proportioned to the station in
society of the injured party--twice as high for the nobleman as for the
squire, three times as high for the squire as for the yeoman (if one
may be permitted to use as a very rough approximation the terms current
in modern society); but it is important to remember that obligation
in this system of law went hand in hand with privilege. If the _wer_
for an injured thegn was high, it was on the level of that wer that
he would have to atone to the king for offences committed by him
against the law of the land.[104] The _wergild_ tariff, however, though
frequently referred to, is not regularly set forth in the laws either
of Ethelbert or of Ine, an omission common to it with many of the other
Teutonic codes, especially that of the Lombards. Probably the amount
of _wer_ payable in each case was so well known through long usage
that the legislator deemed it needless to set it forth anew, but it is
possible also that there was a variable element left, in some cases, to
be the subject of bargaining between the two kins of the injurer and
the injured. Some broad lines of demarcation, however, may be clearly
traced. We know that the ceorl was called a _twy-hynd_ man, because
the ordinary compensation for his violent death was 200 shillings. A
Welshman, however, who owned that single hide of land which seems to
have been the normal property of the well-to-do ceorl, was entitled to
a _wergild_ of only 120 shillings, but if he so prospered as to become
the owner of five hides of English soil then his wergild rose to the
proportionate amount of _600_ shillings.
The class next above the ceorl, the class corresponding with the gentry
of modern times, the large land-holders who do not happen to hold any
official position at the king’s court, were in the ninth century spoken
of as _thegns_; and that word may, for convenience, be used here,
though it is perhaps doubtful whether it was yet used as the simple
designation of a class. In the word thegn the thought of soldiership
and of service to the king seem almost inseparably blended. In the
poem of Beowulf thegns seems to be equivalent to warriors.; while in
the charters of Anglo-Saxon kings the Latin equivalent of thegn is
almost invariably _minister_. In the laws of Ine these men seem to be
generally spoken of as _gesithcund_, men who by birth were entitled to
be comrades and attendants of the king; and it is almost certain that
they are identical with the _twelf-hyndemen_, their wergild being fixed
at 1,200 shillings. Higher than this these laws do not enable us to go,
but the tenor of later legislation supports the conjecture that the
_wergild_ for an ealdorman or for a bishop was 4,800 shillings, for an
archbishop or etheling (member of the royal house), 9,000 shillings,
and for the king himself, 18,000 shillings.[105]
It will be seen that the Ealdorman is here put on a level with the
Bishop. At the point of West Saxon history which we have now reached,
there seems to have been one ealdorman to every shire. He commanded the
_fyrd_ of his shire in battle, he presided along with the bishop and
the reeve in the shire-gemot, of which later laws than Ine’s inform us:
and altogether his position may perhaps be best imagined by comparing
it with that of a modern lord-lieutenant of a county.
* * * * *
Some further light on the ranks and orders in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
is shown by the rather copious ordinances on the subject of that
judicial process which is generally called compurgation. This name is
not technically correct, as it is of ecclesiastical origin and belongs
to later times than those with which we are now dealing; but we have
not yet naturalised “oath-helping” as the Germans have naturalised
_eid-hilfe_, and the word _ath-fultum_, occasionally used in the
Anglo-Saxon laws, has not yet attained the same degree of currency as
_wergild_. With the word “compurgation,” therefore, we must for the
present rest satisfied.
We first meet with this custom in the fourteenth law of King Ine, who
says, “If any one be accused of brigandage he shall clear himself by
120 hides or pay accordingly”. We naturally inquire what is meant by
“clearing oneself by 14,400 acres,” and we receive further light on the
question when we come to law 19 which tells us that “a king’s retainer
(_geneat_) if his wer is 1,200 shillings may swear for 60 hides if he
be a communicant,” on which the later Latin translator adds the gloss,
“for 60 hides, that is for six men”.
We now see more plainly the meaning of “swearing by 120 hides”. A
man accused of such a grave crime against society as brigandage
must, in order to prove his innocence, procure the attestation of
at least two king’s tenants (each presumably holding sixty hides
of land) or twelve land-owners (each owner of ten hides), and they
must swear that they believe him innocent. This is “oath-helping” or
“compurgation”. This swearing process is, as has been often pointed
out, not in the least like our modern examination of sworn witnesses
to fact, nor does it contain the promise of our modern trial by
jury. It is much more akin to the privilege allowed to the defendant
of “calling witnesses to character,” a privilege which, where the
evidence is only circumstantial, often has an important influence on
the verdict. It must be admitted that even with us the force of such
evidence frequently depends in some measure on the social status of the
witness-bearers, but we should shrink from making the bald statement
that a man accused of murder must produce two persons paying income-tax
on £10,000 a year, or twenty persons at £1,000 a year, to declare their
belief in his innocence.
The amount of “swearing power,” if it may be so called, belonging
to each class of men is not very clearly stated. From the passage
quoted above, with its Latin gloss, one is inclined to suppose
that the ordinary ceorl swore for ten hides. It has been recently
argued[106] that he swore only for five or perhaps six hides. There
is, however, evidently something factitious in the ownership of land
thus theoretically assigned to him. We may say, certainly, that the
ordinary ceorl did not possess five, much less ten hides of land; nor
were all thegns, who had probably the same swearing power as the king’s
_geneat_, possessed of sixty hides, say 7,200 acres. We may therefore
rather look upon the number of hides for which ceorl, thegn and king’s
thegn were entitled to swear as a conventional mode of stating for the
guidance of the judge, the weight that was to be attached to their
testimony when they gave it on behalf of a man accused of crime.
Perhaps also there was in this curious tariff of credibility an attempt
to ascertain the extent to which the belief of the vicinage could be
relied on in the prisoner’s behalf. The ordinary ceorl, cultivating
perhaps only one hide, but mingling with a certain number of his fellow
ceorls in the exercise of his daily toil, might vouch for the opinion
of the owners of ten hides; while the king’s retainer, from his wider
field of observation, could vouch for the belief of a district six
times as large.
From a consideration of the laws of Ine and other nearly contemporary
sources, we may, perhaps, safely arrive at the following general
conclusions as to the nature of the social edifice in the eighth
century. At the summit of that edifice we find, of course, the
king. He is king as yet of only a few English shires, a monarch of
far less importance than the Frankish kings before they sank into
inefficiency, yet a much greater man than many who had borne the same
title in preceding centuries. In the early history and charters of the
Anglo-Saxons we are struck with the large number of persons who bear
the title of _cyning_ or _rex_. Edwin slays five kings when fighting
against the Saxons. Four kings were reigning at the same time in
Sussex, three in Essex. There were kings of the Hwiccas (Worcestershire
and Warwickshire) and a separate kingdom of the Middle Angles and
of Lindsey, all of which vanished leaving no trace in the so-called
“Heptarchy” of later historians.[107]
All this, though partly accounted for by the tendency to treat the
kingdom as a family estate and to divide it up at the king’s death
among his surviving sons, shows also that there must have been a strong
movement in the opposite direction, a tendency towards unity and
consolidation to produce the three comparatively large and powerful
kingdoms of Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, which are practically all
that are of historic importance in the eighth century.
It may have been partly on account of the increasing majesty of the
royal name that the nobility (if we may thus speak of the classes
reaching from the throne down to the lowest stratum of thegn-hood)
became, what perhaps they had not been originally, a class of
_ministri_ and _milites_, servants to the king in peace and in
war. Writers on the early constitution of the Germanic states are
accustomed to dwell on the distinction between the primeval “nobility
by birth” and its successor, “nobility by service”. Without denying the
probability that nobles of the first kind existed among the invaders of
England, we must admit that in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as we know them
it is the second species, “nobility by service,” in the king’s court
with which we find ourselves chiefly brought in contact. When the king
takes counsel with his _witan_ it is with the archbishop and bishops,
with the ealdormen, the king’s thegns and the “exalted councillors”
(_gethungenan witan_) in their various degrees that he deliberates,
with their concurrence that he makes laws for the welfare of the realm,
and by their cross-made signatures that his charters granting land
are attested. We do not appear to have any accurate information as to
the time of meeting of the _witan_ (_witenagemot_). Nor was the place
of meeting by any means always the same even for each Saxon kingdom,
though Winchester, Kingston, and in later times London, were frequent
homes of the West Saxon _witenagemot_.
The functions of this great council of the wise men of the realm, the
degree to which they shared or controlled the royal power in matters
of legislation, of finance, of the defence of the country, are better
learned by watching the course of national history than from any
attempt to frame a definition of that which was essentially vague,
fluctuating and incoherent. The relation between the _witenagemot_
and the medieval parliaments of the Plantagenets must be felt to be
only one of rather faint analogy. In some respects the contemporary
ecclesiastical councils of Visigothic Spain, at any rate in their later
phases, present a much closer correspondence of type. It certainly
seems, from the language of the Chronicle, that the English witan,
like those councils, had a powerful voice in the election of the king,
though, unlike the Spanish councillors, the Wise Men of Wessex were, in
their choice, for the greater part of the time confined to one royal
line, the men “whose descent goeth unto Cerdic”.[108]
NOTE ON ANGLO-SAXON MONEY.
To understand properly the information about wergilds supplied to
us by the Anglo-Saxon laws, we must devote a little attention to
the Anglo-Saxon currency. Our ancestors a thousand years ago used
for the most part the same pecuniary language that we use to-day.
They generally spoke of pounds, shillings and pence; and the clerkly
ecclesiastics who had to translate these words into Latin employed the
_Libra_, _Solidus_ and _Denarius_, which have given us the well-known
symbols £ s. d. This translation, however, into the terms of Roman
currency has done nothing but confuse our own monetary history. _Libra_
as the translation of pound is unobjectionable, but _solidus_--the only
coin of that name that obtained wide currency, the _solidus aureus_ of
Constantinople--was a gold coin of which 72 went to the pound of gold,
and was in intrinsic value equal to about thirteen shillings of our
present money. No _scilling_ that any Anglo-Saxon legislator ever dealt
with had any such intrinsic value as this. Similarly the _denarius_,
the true denarius of the republic and of the early empire, was a silver
coin intrinsically worth about eightpence of our present currency. No
penny in any Anglo-Saxon coinage ever approached this value; and the
translation of denarius by penny has introduced confusion even into
some well-known passages of the English Bible. Let us, therefore,
for the sake of clearness, wholly disregard the pretended Roman
equivalents, and confine our attention to the true, long-enduring Saxon
denominations, the _pund_, the _scilling_ and the _penig_.
1. The _pund_ meant a pound’s weight of silver. It was purely a “money
of account,” as no coin representing this value was ever struck by any
Anglo-Saxon king. According to the present value of metals, it would be
worth intrinsically somewhat less than £2 sterling.
2. The _scilling_ was also only a money of account, represented by no
actual coin. Its derivation (from _scylan_, to divide) seems to point
to the fact that it was originally a portion of a silver ornament,
probably a torque or an armlet broken off and cast into the scale, for
payment by weight of the trader’s demand. Even so, as we may remember,
St. Oswald ordered his beautiful silver dish to be broken up and
distributed to the starving crowd, who would take these _scyllingas_
into the market and exchange them there for the needed food. At a later
time the _scilling_ acquired a definite value, which, however, varied
much in the different English kingdoms. The Kentish _scilling_ was
one-twelfth of a pound; the Wessex _scilling_, one-forty-eighth; and
the Mercian, one-sixtieth.
3. But however much the _scilling_ might vary, the penny (_pending_,
_pening_ or _penig_) seems in all the English kingdoms to have ever
borne the same proportion to the pound which it bears at present,
namely, as 1 to 240. This enables us to state the varying values of the
_scilling_ in the following manner:--
The _scilling_ of Kent = 20 peningas.
Do. Wessex = 5[109] „
Do. Mercia = 4 „
Here at last, in this lowest and humblest denomination, we get
something which is not a mere “money of account”. The silver pennies
of the Anglo-Saxon kings, which reach from the middle of the eighth
century right down to the Norman conquest, and whose successors formed
practically the only money of the country until the reign of Edward
III., are the glory of the numismatic collector, but suggest strange
thoughts as to the stage of civilisation reached by a country whose
only coin was a little bit of silver, one-twentieth of an ounce in
weight.
A few words must be said (1) as to the intrinsic value, and (2) as to
the purchasing power of these moneys.
(1) As to the first question we are met by the practical difficulty
of deciding what is the present value of silver. Not thirty years ago
silver was worth fully 4s. 6d. an ounce, or £2 14s. a pound; now it
fetches about half that price. But if we take, for convenience, the
larger quotation, representing the old-fashioned ratio between gold and
silver of 15½ to 1, we get roughly the following results:--
The _pund_ = £2 14s. in intrinsic value.
_Scilling_ of Kent = 1/12 of a pound = 4s. 6d. in intrinsic value.
Do. Wessex = 1/48 „ = 1s. 1½d. „
Do. Mercia = 1/60 „ = 10⅘ pence „
The _penig_ = about two pence and three farthings „
(2) The “purchasing power” of money in those days is of course a
different and a far more difficult question. As every one knows,
since the discovery of America and the opening up of enormous fresh
sources of supply of the precious metals, prices have been altogether
revolutionised, and the “purchasing power” of an ounce of gold or
silver has been enormously lessened.
The following are a few indications given us by the laws of Ine and
some of his successors as to the prices prevalent in his time:--
1. An ewe with one lamb, 1 scilling (= 1s. 1½d.).
Present value, £2 10s. Ratio 1 to 44.
2. Maintenance of a peasant’s child, 6 scillings (6s. 9d.) per
annum _plus_ a cow in summer and an ox in winter.
Equivalent to our time to about £6. Ratio 1 to 17.
3. A peasant’s blouse was worth 6 peningas (1s. 4d.).
This was probably a rather elaborate affair, and if
hand-worked might be worth at the present time £1 10s.
Ratio 1 to 22.
4. A sheep’s fleece, 2 peningas (5½d.).
Present price, 7s. Ratio 1 to 15.
From the laws of Athelstan:--
5. A good horse, 24 scillings (£1 7s.).
Present price, £40. Ratio 1 to 30 nearly.
6. A sheep, 1 scilling (1s. 1½d.).
Present price, £2. Ratio 1 to 35.
From the law concerning the Dunsaete (Welsh mountaineers) (tenth
century):--
7. A mare, 20 scillings (£1 2s. 6d.).
Present price, £25. Ratio 1 to 22.
8. A “swine,” 1⅗ scilling (1s. 10d.).
Present price, £1 10s. Ratio 1 to 16.
9. A sheep, 1 scilling (1s. 1½d.).
Present price, £2. Ratio 1 to 35.
10. A goat, ⅖ of a scilling (5½d.).
Present price, 15s. Ratio 1 to 33.
It will be seen from the above rough calculations how impossible it is
to get any fixed proportion between the purchasing power of money in
Anglo-Saxon times and in our own. As to one very important element,
the price of grain, we have no satisfactory information; but from the
records of later centuries (from the thirteenth onwards) it seems
probable that, with frequent and violent fluctuations, it generally
ruled relatively higher than the price of cattle.
On the whole, for historical purposes, if the reader mentally
translates the scilling of Wessex into the pound sterling of our own
day he will probably not go far wrong.
It may be well to add a few other monetary terms belonging chiefly to
the later centuries of Anglo-Saxon history.
1. The _Mancus_ was one-eighth of a pund: or 30 penings. The name is
said to be derived from the Arabic. The Mancus in the time of Athelstan
was the standard price of an ox.
2. The _Thrymsa_ of Mercia was originally a gold coin (derived from the
Roman _tremissis_), but afterwards the word was used to denote a unit
of value, the equivalent of 3 penings.
3. The _Sceatt_ was very nearly equivalent to the pening; but 250 not
240 went to the pund.
4. The _Mark_, a Danish word, denotes the equivalent of half a pound.
5. The _Ora_ was the eighth part of a mark. It was held to be
equivalent to 2½ scillings of Wessex, but there is some difficulty
in the equation of these Danish and Saxon currencies. According to
_Domesday Book_ the Ore contained 20 pence, and accordingly the
Mark would be equal not to 120 but to 160 pence. On the other hand,
Ethelred’s laws, iv., 9, say that the pound contained 15 ores. This
would make the Mark if it was half a pound equivalent to 7½ ores.
(See Chadwick, _l.c._, chapter i., for a discussion of this perplexing
question.)