canvas-along the banks of the Öxará river, and turned out their horses to pasture by the lake. Places were appointed for the holding of the several courts, while the Lögrétta or legislative committee sat on a spot which nature seemed to have herself designed for the purpose. Two of the extraordinary chasms by which the plain is seamed, each some eighty feet deep, and filled for the lower fifty feet by bright green water, enclose a narrow strip of lava some two hundred yards long, cutting it off, except at one point where there is a narrow entrance which three men might hold, from the surrounding land. The surface is nearly level, covered by short grass now browsed by a few sheep; and there is nothing to tell that in this space, in the full sight of the assembled multitude, the heroes of ancient Iceland spoke and voted their laws, and gave their verdicts; while from an eminence in the midst of the enclosure, still called the Lögberg, or Hill of Laws, the LawSpeaker recited the law of the nation in the sight and hearing of the multitude that stood on the further side of the chasms1. Not only so: there is all round nothing whatever to show that the place has ever been different from what it is now. Between the Lögberg and the lake stands the little wooden church and its humble parsonage. No other house is near, nor any sign of human life. Only the islet is still pointed out in the river where the solemn duels which the laws of Iceland

1 Since this was written, some eminent antiquaries, including my lamented friend Dr. Guðbrand Vigfússon, have argued that the true Lögberg is to be sought not in this spot which tradition indicates, but on the edge of the great lava rift called the Almannagjá to the west of the river. See The Saga Steads of Iceland, by W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson, 1899,

pp. 14-17.

recognized were fought, and the deep green swirling pool into which women condemned for witchcraft were hurled from the brink of the precipice. In most of the spots to which the traveller is drawn, by memories of constitutional freedom or of political struggles, his imagination is aided by the remains of the buildings where assemblies met or monarchs sat enthroned. Here man has left nothing to speak of his presence, and it is hard to realize, when one looks on this silent and desolate scene, that it was once filled by so much strenuous life, and so often resounded to the clash of

arms.

For the Alping was not merely an assembly for the dispatch of business: it was the great annual gathering of the whole nation, a gathering all the more needed in a land where there are no towns, and most men live miles away from their nearest neighbours. To it chieftains rode with their wives and daughters and a band of armed retainers from the furthest corners of the country, taking perhaps, as those must have done who came from the East fjords along the northern edge of the great central desert, a fortnight or more on the way. Shipmasters from Norway or Ireland brought their wares for sale. Artisans plied their trades. We are told that even jugglers' sheds and drinkingbooths were set up, and games of all kinds carried on. It was a great opportunity not only for the renewing of friendships between those who lived in distant parts of the country, but for the arranging of adoptions and marriages; and the Sagas mention numerous instances in which proposals were made or betrothals entered into at a meeting of the

Alþing, in most of which instances the will of the maiden seems to have prevailed over that of her parents. It was midsummer, when there is in those latitudes no night, but the glare of day subsides for a few hours into an exquisitely rich and tender twilight, clothing the sky with colours never seen in our duller air. And we can fancy how those who followed their fathers to the Alping found compensation for all the loneliness and gloom of the long winter in this one fortnight of vivid mirth and excitement.

The meeting of the Alþing was not only the centre of the political life of the Republic. It was, so to speak, the Republic itself, for it was only then that the Republic became visible before men's eyes or acted as a collective whole. During the rest of the year lawsuits and everything else of public concern were left to the Quarter pings and local pings, and to the local Goðis. The few laws or resolutions of general concern which the Alping passed-they were few, because its legislative activity was chiefly occupied in regulating its own judicial proceedings-were probably meant to be accepted and observed over the whole island, but the Alping did not attempt to enforce them, and indeed had no machinery by which it could do so. Each Goði was, in a loose way, a sort of executive magistrate over his own pingmen; but he did not derive his authority from the Central or Federal Alping, and he was not responsible to the Alping for its exercise. The Republic, if we may so call it, had no Executive whatever. Its sole official was the Law-Speaker (of whom more anon), but his function was only to declare the law, and was exercised only while the Alping was

sitting. At other times the constituent pings and Goðis were virtually quite independent, and might and often did carry on war with one another, subject to no penalty or liability for so doing, save in so far as an action for compensation might be brought against any one who had killed another. There was no police, no militia, no fleet, no army, nor any means, like those provided in the feudal kingdoms of contemporary Europe, of raising an army. The isle lay so far away from all other countries except Greenland, on which an Iceland.clony had been planted, that it happily did not need to have a foreign policy. There was neither public revenue nor public expenditure, neither exchequer nor budget. No taxes were levied by the Republic, as indeed no expenses were incurred on its behalf.

The Icelandic Republic was in fact a government developed only upon its judicial and (to a much smaller extent) upon its legislative side, omitting altogether the executive and international sides, which were in the Greek and Roman world, and have again in the modern world, become so important. For a community to exist with such an absence of administrative organization was obviously possible only in a region like Iceland, severed by a wide and stormy sea from the rest of the world, and with a very thin and scattered population; possible too only in a simple state of society where man's needs are few and every one fends for himself.

The system whose outlines I have sought to draw is full of interest and suggestion, as well to the student of legal theory as to the constitutional historian.

Some modern theorists derive law from the State, and cannot think of law as existing without a State. A few among them have in England gone so far as to deny that Customary Law is law at all, and to define all Law as a Command issued by the State power. But here in Iceland we find Law, and indeed (as will appear presently) a complex and highly developed legal system, existing without the institutions which make a State; for a community such as has been described, though for convenience it may perhaps be called a Republic, is clearly not a State in the usual sense of the word. Of Iceland, indeed, one may say that so far from the State creating the Law, the Law created the State-that is to say, such State organization as existed came into being for the sake of deciding lawsuits. There it ended. When the decision had been given, the action of the Republic stopped. To carry it out was left to a successful plaintiff; and the only effect a decision had, so far as the Courts were concerned, was to expose the person resisting it to the penalties of outlawry— that is to say, any one might slay him, like Cain, without incurring in respect of his death any liability on the footing of which his relatives could sue the slayer. Law in fact existed without any public responsibility for enforcing it, the sanction, on which modern jurists so often dwell as being vital to the conception of law, being found partly in public opinion, partly in the greater insecurity which attached to the life of the person who disregarded a judgement. Yet law was by no means ineffective. Doubtless it was often defied, and sometimes successfully defied. That happened everywhere in the earlier Middle Ages, and happens to-day in