the 'lordless' man became a sort of outlaw; the free churl, who had held his land straight from the Maker of it, sank into the villain,' and with his personal freedom went his share in the government. The bulk of the workmen are serfs. In a dialogue of the tenth century, written for popular instruction, the ploughman says: 'I labor much. I go out at daybreak, urging the oxen to the field, and I yoke them to the plough. I am bound to plough every day a full acre or more.' The herdsman says: "When the ploughman separates the oxen, I lead them to the meadows, and all night I stand watching over them on account of thieves; and again in the morning I take them to the plough, well-fed and watered.' And the shepherd: 'In the first part of the morning I drive my sheep to their pasture, and stand over them in heat and cold with my dogs, lest the wolves destroy them. I lead them back to their folds, and milk them twice a day; and I move their folds, and make cheese and butter, and am faithful to my lord.'

The military oppression of the Normans levelled all degrees of tenants and servants into a modified slavery. The English lord was pushed from his place by the Norman baron, and sank into the position from which he had thrust the churl. The peasant the producer- had no alternative but to abide from the cradle to the grave in one spot, and was held to be only fulfilling his natural destiny when he toiled without hope for the privileged consumer. 'Why should villains eat beef or any dainty food?' asks one of the Norman minstrels.

The social organization of every rural part of England rested on the manorial system,—a division of the land, for purposes of cultivation and internal order, into a number of large estates. The lord of the manor, instead of cultivating the estate through his own bailiff, at length found it more convenient and profitable to distribute it among tenants at a given rent, payable either in money or in produce. This habit of leasing afforded an opportunity by which the aspiring among the tenantry could rise to a position of apparent equality with their older masters. The growing use of the words 'farm' and 'farmer' from the twelfth century mark the initial steps of a peasant revolution. The

1A peasant, one of the lowest class of feudal tenants; a bondman, and later a vile, wicked person. One of the many words which men have dragged downwards with themselves, and made more or less partakers of their own fall.

tenants were subject to many exactions. The lord's bull and boar were free, under the conditions of tenure, to range at night through their standing corn and grass; and their sheep,-for they were permitted to acquire and hold property upon sufferance, were always to be folded on their master's land. That the land was indifferently farmed we may well believe, when we learn that the highest rent was seven pence an acre, and the lowest a farthing. The rise of the farmer class was soon followed by that of the free laborer. Influences, indeed, had long been quietly freeing the peasantry from their local bondage. Prior to the Conquest, pure slavery was gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church. Subsequently she urged emancipation, as a mark of piety, on all estates but her own. The fugitive bondsman found freedom in chartered towns, where a residence of one year and a day conferred franchise. The pomp of chivalry and the cost of incessant campaigns drained the royal and baronial purse; and the sale of freedom to the serf, or of exemption from services to the villain, afforded an easy and tempting mode of replenishment. Thus, by a solemn deed in 1302, for forty marks, 'Robert Crul and Matilda his wife, with all his offspring begotten and to be begotten, together with all his goods holden and to be holden,' was rendered 'forever free and quit from all yoke of servitude.'

In the silent growth and elevation of the people, the boroughs led the way. The English town was originally a piece of the general country, where people, either for purposes of trade or protection, happened to cluster more closely than elsewhere. It was organized and governed in the same way as the manors around it, justice was administered, its customary services exacted, its annual rent collected, by the officer of the king, noble, or ecclesiastic, to whose estate it belonged. Its inhabitants were bound to reap their lord's corn crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his pound. Its dues paid and services rendered, however, property and person alike were secured against arbitrary seizure. The townsman's rights were rigidly defined by custom, and by custom were constantly widening. By disuse or forgetfulness, services would disappear, while privileges and immunities were being for the most part purchased by hard bargaining. At Leicester, for instance, one of the chief

aims of its burgesses was to regain their old English practice of compurgation, for which had been substituted the foreign trial by duel. Says a charter of the time:

It chanced that two kinsmen . . . waged a duel about a certain piece of land, concerning which a dispute had arisen between them; and they fought from the first to the ninth hour, each conquering by turns. Then one of them fleeing from the other till he came to a certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit, and was about to fall therein, his kinsman said to him, "Take care of the pit, turn back lest thou shouldest fall into it." Thereat so much clamor and noise was made by the by-standers and those who were sitting around, that the Earl heard these clamors as far off as the castle, and he inquired of some how it was there was such a clamor, and answer was made to him that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain piece of ground, and that one had fled till he reached a certain little pit, and that, as he stood over the pit and was about to fall into it, the other warned him. Then the townsmen, being moved with pity, made a covenant with the Earl that they should give him three pence yearly for each house in the High Street that had a gable, on condition that he should grant to them that the twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient times should from that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they might have among themselves.'

At the close of the thirteenth century, al the more important towns had secured freedom of trade, of justice, and of government. Their liberties and charters served as models and incentives to the smaller communities struggling into existence. While the tendency at first seems to have been agricultural, at the Conquest it had become mercantile, and the controlling class was the merchant guild. Wealth and industry developed into dangerous rivalry a second class, composed of escaped serfs, of traders without lands, of the artisans and the poor. Without share in the right and regulation of trade, their struggles for power and privilege began in the reign of the first Henry, and their turbulent election of a London mayor in 1261 marks their final victory.

In the tenth century, a man wished for two things,—not to be slain, and to have a good leather coat. The state of warfare still contends against the state of order. The right of aggrieved persons to interfere with the sober course of the law is acknowledged even by Alfred:

'We also command that the man who knows his foe to be home-sitting, fight not before he demand justice of him. If he have such power that he can beset his foe and besiege him within, let him keep him within for seven days, and attack him not if he will remain within.'

There are so many pagan Danes and other disreputable persons scattered up and down the land, that society must protect itself in a summary fashion:

If a stranger or foreigner shall wander from the highway, and then neither call out nor sound a horn, he is to be taken for a thief and killed, or redeemed by fine."

When Henry II, succeeding the Norman king, ascended the throne in 1154, he found his kingdom a prey to horrible anarchy. The royal domains were surrounded on all sides by menacing fortresses garrisoned by resolute soldiers who recognized no authority but that of their chiefs. Within three years, eleven hundred of these castles, the haunts of robbers, were razed to the ground, while the peasants and townspeople applauded the work of destruction. He may be truly said to have initiated 'the rule of law.' Ten years after his accession the principle of pecuniary compensation for crime had, for the most part, been superseded by criminal laws, administered with stern severity. Yet outrage continues to be the constant theme of legislation. In the reign of the first Edward, every man was bound to hold himself in readiness, duly armed, for the king's service or the hue and ery which pursued the felon. An act for the suppression of crimes directs that,

For the greater security of the people, walled towns shall keep their gates shut from sun-set to sun-rise; and none shall lodge all night in their suburbs, unless his host shall answer for him. All towns shall be kept as in times past, with a watch all night at each gate, with a number of men.'

Another, after reciting the commission of robberies, murders, and riots, in the city of London, enjoins:

That none be found in the streets, either with spear or buckler, after the curfew-bell rings out, except they be great lords, or other persons of note; also, that no tavern, either for wine or ale, be kept open after that hour on forfeiture of forty pence.'

Once, during this reign, a band of lesser nobles disguise their way into a great merchant fair; fire every booth, rob and slaughter the merchants, and carry the booty off to ships lying in wait. Molten streams of silver and gold, says the tale of horror, flowed down the gutters to the sea. Lawless companies of club-men maintain themselves by general violence, aid the country nobles in their feuds, wrest money and goods from the tradesmen. Under a show of courtesy the bloodthirsty instinct breaks out. Richard of the Lion-heart has a lion's appetite. Under the walls of Acre he wants some pork. There being none to be had, a young Saracen is killed, cooked, salted, and served him. He eats it with a relish, and desires to see the head of the pig. The cook produces it trembling, the king laughs, and says the army, having provisions so convenient, has nothing to fear from famine. The town taken, he has thirty of the most noble prisoners beheaded,

bids his cook boil the heads and serve one to each of the ambassadors who came to sue for their pardon. Thereupon the sixty thousand prisoners are led into the plain for execution.

Theodore, who founded the English Church, denied Christian burial to the kidnapper, and prohibited the sale of children by their parents after the age of seven. The murder of a slave, though no crime in the eye of the State, became a sin for which penance was due to the Church. Manumission became frequent in wills, as a boon to the souls of the dead. Usually the slave was set free before the altar; sometimes at the spot where four roads met, and there bidden go whither he would. In the more solemn form, his master took him by the hand in full shire meeting, showed him the open road and door, and gave him the lance and sword of the freeman. A hundred years after the prohibition, in the ninth century, of the slave-traffic from English ports, men and women are said to have been bought in all parts of England and carried to Ireland for sale. 'You might,' says a chronicler, 'have seen with sorrow long files of young people of both sexes and of the greatest beauty bound with ropes and daily exposed for sale. . . . They sold in this manner as slaves their own children.' Not till the reign of Henry II was it finally suppressed in its last stronghold, the port of Bristol.

A law of 1285, relating to highways, directs:

"That those ways shall be enlarged where bushes, woods, or dykes be, where men may lurk, so that there be neither dyke, tree, nor bush within two hundred feet on each side of those roads, great trees excepted.'

A provision which illustrates at once the social and physical condition of the country at the time. The roads are narrow-from four to eight feet—and of difficult passage. A bishop, journeying to London, is obliged to rest his beasts of burden on alternate days of travel. Returning, he accomplishes the first day only five miles. Travellers ride on horseback, and convey their culinary wares or merchandise in pack-saddles. The dead, the invalid, ladies of rank, are carried in a horse-litter, borne by horses and mules, sometimes by men. Carts are the carriages of the nobility, distinguished from the common description by ornament. Even that of King John is springless, the body rests upon the

axletree, the wheels are cut from solid pieces of circular wood, covered ornamentally, and bound round with a thick wooden