the institution of the Alping, and to have represented the first stage in the organization of a larger community out of the small local þings. But it tended in course of time to lose its importance.

Ordinary lawsuits and questions of local interest were determined in these minor pings, while graver suits, or those in which the parties belonged to different pings, or where it was sought to reverse the decision of a local ping, as well as all proposals for alterations of the general law, were brought before the Alping, at its annual meeting in June. It seems to have been therefore partly a court of first instance and partly a court of appeal. Now the Alping was open, like other primary Teutonic and Hellenic assemblies, to all freemen who chose to attend; but its powers were practically exercised by a limited number of persons, viz. the Goðis and certain members nominated by them.

For judicial purposes, the Alping acted through four Courts, one for each Quarter. Each Quarter Court (fjorðungsdómr) consisted, according to one view, of thirty-six members, viz. the Goðis of the Quarter with twenty-four nominees, and, according to another view, of nine persons nominated by the Godis of the Quarter. There was also a fifth Court (called the fimtardómr), instituted later than the others (A. D. 1004), on the sug gestion of the famous jurist Njál, son of Thorgeir. This Court, which exercised jurisdiction in cases where one of the other Courts had failed, was composed in a somewhat different way, acted under a more stringent oath, and gave its decisions by a majority, whereas in other Courts unanimity was required. It

seems to have been intended not only to avert armed strife by providing a better method for settling disputes, but also to organize the country as a whole and give it something approaching to a central authority. This result, however, was not attained, the social and physical obstacles proving insuperable.

In these judicial committees of the Alping lawsuits were brought and argued with an elaborate formality and a minute adherence to technical rules far more strict than is now practised anywhere in Europe, a fact which will appear the more extraordinary when we remember that in those days both the law and all the appropriate forms of words which the parties were obliged to employ were not written, but preserved solely by the memory of individual men.

The

For legislative purposes the Alping acted through another committee of 144 persons, only one-third (forty-eight) of whom, being the thirty-nine Goðis and nine nominees, had the right of voting. nine nominees were persons chosen by the Goðis of the East, South, and West Quarters, three by each Quarter, in order to give each of these Quarters the same strength in the Committee as the North Quarter had with its twelve Goðis. Each of the forty-eight appointed two assessors who advised him, sitting one behind him and the other in front of him, so that he could readily seek their counsel, and thus the 144 were made up, the forty-eight being described as the Middle Bench. This Committee was called the Lögrétta (lit. 'Law Amending'), and by it all changes in the law were made, and all matters of common interest discussed. It was essentially an aristocratic body, as

indeed the whole Constitution bore an aristocratic colour, though there was no such thing as a formal distinction of rank1, much less any titled nobility. After the introduction of Christianity in A.D. 1000, the two bishops were added to the Lögrétta, while at the head of all, making up the number of members to 147, stood an elected officer, called the Speaker of the Law.

This last-named personage, the solitary official of the republic, is one of the most curious parts of the system. He was called the Lögsögumaðr, literally 'Law-say-man,' or, as we may render it, Speaker, or Declarer, of the Law, and was the depositary and organ of the unwritten common law of the country. It was his duty to recite aloud, in the hearing of the greater number of those present at the ping, the whole law of Iceland, going through it in the three years during which he held office; and to recite once in every year the formulas of actions, this being the part of the law which was of most practical importance. Besides this, he presided in the Lögrétta, giving a casting vote where the votes were equal; and he was bound to answer every one who asked him what the provisions of the law actually were, although not required to advise applicants as to the course they ought to follow in a given case. When in any suit a question of what was the legal rule arose, reference was made to him, and his decision was accepted as final. For these labours he received a yearly salary of two hundred ells of Vaðmál (the blue

1 Although the penalty for killing a man of high lineage was heavier than that for an ordinary freeman; and one perceives from the Sagas how carefully genealogies were preserved and what great respect was paid to long descent.

woollen cloth which then served as currency, and which continued to do so, for some purposes, down to our own time), besides one-half of the fines imposed at the Alping. He was of course selected from the most accomplished lawyers of the time. His declarations of the law were conclusive, at least during his three years' term of office, in all causes and over all persons. Thus he exercised a kind of quasi-judicial or quasi-legislative power, and has been fancifully compared to the Roman Praetor, also an officer elected for a term, also by his edicts the declarer of the law he had to administer1. But the Law-Speaker was in reality neither judge nor magistrate, nor, indeed, a legislator, except in so far as the right to enounce and interpret borders on legislation. He delivered no judgements, he had no power of enforcing a decision or of punishing an offender. He did not even open the Alping and take the responsibility for keeping order at it, for these functions belonged to the Goði of the district, called, because the Alping met within his jurisdiction, the Allsherjargoði (priest of the whole host). The Lögsögumaðr was in fact nothing but the living voice of the law, enunciating those customary rules which had come down from the foretime, rules which all accepted, though they were not preserved in any written form, and though they must have been practically unknown to the great majority of the citizens.

The office, although more important in Iceland from the absence of a king or local prince, was one of which we find traces among other Scandinavian peoples, or

1 Viva vox iuris civilis was the description which the Romans used to give of their Praetor, as to whom see Essay XIV, vol. ii. p. 274.

at least among the Norsemen. It appears in Norway, in the Orkneys, and in the Hebrides (though there the name is Lögman, which in Iceland means merely one learned in the law).

Thingvellir, where the Alping met from the year 930 down to a time within the memory of living men, is a spot not less remarkable physically than memorable for the stirring events of which it was the witness. It is a slightly undulating plain, some five miles long by three wide, washed on the south by a broad islandstudded lake, and girdled in at its northern end by lofty mountains, their black volcanic rocks streaked here and there with snow-beds. The surface is all of lava, sometimes bare and rugged, sometimes covered with thin brushwood, dwarf birches and willows, sometimes smoothing itself out into sweeps of emerald pasture, but everywhere intersected by profound chasms, formed when the whole was a molten mass. East and west it is hemmed in by two lines of precipices, whose rugged sides seem to show that the plain between them has, at some remote period, perhaps when the lava-flood was cooling, sunk suddenly down, leaving these walls to be the edges of the plateau which stretches away backwards to the east and west. Under the western of these two walls, on the margin of the lake, just where it receives the stream which has flung itself in a sparkling cascade over the precipice, the place of meeting was fixed. The chieftains, who came from every corner of the island with a following of armed companions and dependents, because broils were frequent, and armed strife might interrupt the progress of a lawsuit, built their boothserections of stone and turf roofed for the time with cloth or