herited freedom of the people. When the barbarians landed in Britain they were substantially free, for their rulers were elected by all the freemen. War and a settled residence beget the king.* By the time of Alfred, he had become the "Lord's Anointed," invested with a mysterious dignity.+ Treason against him was punished with death, and he was the fountain of honor. The king, from among his comrades, created a new order of nobility, whose members gradually supplanted the old chiefs. Much of the land was in early days held in common; it was now carved out into estates for the king's dependants. Thus the freedom of the peasant passed away. His freehold was surrendered to be received back as a fief, laden with services to its lord, for in Alfred's day it was assumed that no man could exist without a lord. Gradually, as the kingdoms increased in size, the share of the freemen in all public affairs was greatly dimin ished. There was no election of delegates to national or local assemblies, as in later times; each man had to appear and vote in person. Theoretically, there was a great assembly of the people, in which resided all ultimate authority-the higher justice, imposition of taxes, framing of laws, the conclusion of treaties, the division of the public lands, and the appointment of the chief offices of state. 66 'Practically, the national council shrank into a gathering of the great officers of Church and State with the royal thegns, and the old English democracy * Kingship appears among the English at a time when it was unknown among the Continental races to whom they were most closely related. Gneist, i. 14. Alfred, when a boy, went to Rome, and was anointed by the pope. Ranke's "History of England," i. 20. Other kings had been anointed, however, before his time. SLAVERY-RECONVERSION OF ENGLAND 281 passed into an oligarchy of the closest kind."* These people are simply entering upon the first stage of civilization. The wars and a settled residence also gave a great impetus to slavery. No rank saved the prisoner taken in battle from this doom; and the markets of the world, as far as Rome, were filled with slaves from England. Debt and crime also swelled the ranks of the unfree. Fathers sold their children, husbands their wives. The master could slay his chattel; it was only the loss of a thing. Fleeing from bondage, he might be chased as a strayed beast, and flogged to death if a man, or burned if a woman. The progress of Christianity produced a little amelioration of his state. One bishop denied Christian burial to kidnappers, and prohibited the sale of children by their parents after the age of seven. Another punished with excommunication the sale of child or kinsfolk. Many owners manumitted their slaves, and the slavetrade from English ports was finally, in the tenth century, prohibited by law. This prohibition, however, for a long time remained ineffective. Until the Conquest the wealth of English nobles was said sometimes to spring from breeding slaves for market. It was not until the reign of the first Norman king that the traffic was finally suppressed.+ Across this dark and dreary waste we can here and there catch glimpses of sunshine, although fitful and evanescent. A young deacon named Gregory sees in Rome some English slaves exposed for sale. He becomes interested in the far-distant island, whose people * Green's "Short History," pp. 89, 90, 91. Gneist, i. 101-108. + Green, p. 50. Idem, p. 89. "Life of Bishop Wolstan," cited by Taine. once were servants of the Church, and when elected pope sends Augustine with forty comrades to effect its reconversion. One of the petty kings has married a Christian from France, and this helps on the work. Augustine arrives in 597, but in the end actually accomplished little. The real conversion of England came from Ireland, where Christianity had not been blotted out by the Saxons, and where piety and learning had fixed their home.* Naturally the conversion of the masses did not at first go very deep. They became Christians after the type of Clovis across the Channel, who, having witnessed the Passion Play, cries out, "Why was I not there with my Franks?" As we see through all their literature, the gospel of love, the teachings of the New Testament, made no more impression on their minds than on those of their descendants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to whom the Bible came again as a revelation. They were all equally attracted more by the Old Testament, with its wars, massacres, and tales of blood and vengeance. Still, the very fact of belonging to the Church of the world had its effect; it brought the island into contact with the old civilization of the Continent, and the connection bore some fruit.+ In 668, a Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus, arrives from Rome, is made Archbishop of Canterbury, and the English Church of to-day, so far * Green's "Short History," p. 58. In the times of Tacitus the ports and harbors of Ireland were better known to the Romans than those of Britain, from the concourse of merchants there for purposes of trade. "Life of Agricola,” sec. 24. Gneist pays a high tribute to the Anglo-Saxon Church for its early work, while showing how, in later days, it fell into rudeness and sensuality, i. 85-87, note. Before the Norman Conquest it had acquired about one third of the property of the kingdom, p. 110. THE VENERABLE BEDE-THE DANES-KING ALFRED 283 as its outer form is concerned, becomes the work of his hands. A school is established, which the Venerable Bede attends, where he learns Greek, for the first time taught in England, and with it imbibes a taste for science and letters. Bede passes his life at the monastery of Jarrow, gathers six hundred pupils about him, becomes, as Burke calls him, "the father of English literature," and dies in 755, translating the Gospel of St. John into the vernacular. But upon his death the kingdom of Northumbria, in which he lived, is desolated by incessant wars, the land is laid waste, his scholars are dispersed, and nothing is left of his work but the fortyfive volumes which attest his industry, and a name which glorifies his age.† Later on, in 800, just as the English are becoming one nation, the Danes come in, as utterly heathen and as savage and ferocious as the followers of Hengist and Horsa. They at once wipe out almost all of civilization above the Thames.§ In about seventy years they become masters of the land. Then King Alfred appears on the scene, a man who, seen through the dim mist of tradition, is one of the world's heroes. He roused the people against the Danes, founded a kingdom in the lower part of the island, established peace in his realm, reduced the laws to system, and became the teacher of his people. Alfred did all that he could to correct and * Green's "Short History," p. 65. Gneist, i. 42. + Idem, § Ranke, i. 17; Green's "Short History," pp. 78, 79, 82. Gneist, i. 105. Ranke, the great German historian, pays this tribute to Bede and Alfred. "The first German who made the universal learning derived from antiquity his own was an Anglo-Saxon, the Venerable inform the ignorance of his countrymen, to which they had been reduced by the Danish conquest. When he began to reign, he could find scarcely a priest in the kingdom able to render the Latin service into English. For the benefit of the common people he translated sev eral Latin works, with annotations which sound of the primer. He established schools at court, where the sons of the nobility were instructed in the rudiments of learning; and, taking an idea from Roman jurisprudence, he codified the laws, prefacing them, after the Puritan fashion, with the Ten Commandments and a portion of the law of Moses. Alfred dies, and under one of his successors the Danish portions of the country are brought into complete subjection.* Then follow a few years of peace and national prosperity. But again civil war breaks out, and the heathen Danes reappear in new and greater hordes. They march through the land amid the light of blazing towns and homesteads, and in the end put their own ruler on the throne.+ Cnut proves a wise and beneficent monarch, and for twenty years gives the country peace. But he dies in 1035, and under his ty rannical and incapable successors there ensues a reign of blood, which prepares the way for the coming of a greater conqueror than the Dane. And now what was the condition of the Anglo-Saxons after a residence of six centuries in England? In some important particulars, as we have seen, they certainly had retrograded. The old idea of personal freedom had largely disappeared. The land now, in Bede; the first German dialect in which men wrote history and drew up laws was likewise the Anglo-Saxon.”—Ranke, i. 13. * Aethelstan, 924–941. + Green, p. 91. |