BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Worsaae, An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland (1852), overemphasizes Danish influence. Ramsay, Foundations of England, Vol. I, chaps. xxiii-xxv. Hodgkin, A Political History of England to 1066, chap. xxiii. Green, Conquest of England. Larson, The King's Household in England Before the Norman Conquest, University of Wisconsin Publications, for Cnut's body-guard.

CHAPTER VI

THE ANGLO-SAXON ROYAL COUNCIL

IN Anglo-Saxon times the central government of the realm, in so far as it was organized at all, was vested in the king and his council, or Witan. The treatment of this council by Professor Freeman in his Norman Conquest is one of the best examples imaginable of the way in which the history of ancient institutions may be influenced by the modern theories. Writing at a time when English political philosophy was permeated with liberalism, Professor Freeman discovered a limited monarchy in the AngloSaxon period when the authority of kings depended on force, not law or custom; when no Englishman had ever thought of formal constitutional limitations on the crown; and when the ideas of modern political democracy were wholly impossible in theory or practice. The account given below should be compared with the treatment of the same subject in Mr. Chadwick's Anglo-Saxon Institutions. In conjunction with this, the student should examine the evidence in support of his theory which Professor Freeman has brought together in an Appendix to the first volume of his work.

81. Composition of the Royal Council1

We may be sure that every Teutonic freeman had a voice in the Assembly the Gemôt, the Gemeinde, the Ekklesia - of his own mark. In fact, he in some sort retains it still, as holding his place in the parish vestry. He had a voice; it might be too much to say that he had a vote, for in an early state of things formal divisions are not likely to be often taken; the temper of the Assembly is found out by easier means. But the man who 1 Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, Vol. I, chap. iii. By permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

clashed his arms to express approval, or who joined in the unmistakable sound which expressed dissent, practically gave as efficient a vote as if he had solemnly walked out into a lobby. The Homeric Agorê is the type of every such Assembly, and the likeness of the Homeric Agorê may be seen in an English county-meeting to this day.'

The voice which the simple freeman, the ceorl, had in the Assembly of his mark, he would not lose in the Assembly of his shire, the Scirgemót. The county court is to this day an assembly of all the freeholders of the shire. But the right of attending the Assembly of the shire would become really less valuable than the right of attending the Assembly of the mark. The larger the Assembly, the more distant the place of meeting, the more difficult, and therefore the more rare, does the attendance of individual members become, and the smaller is the importance of each individual member when he gets there. We cannot doubt that the Assemblies of the mark, of the shire, and of the kingdom all co-existed; but at each stage of amalgamation the competence of the inferior assembly would be narrowed.

We cannot doubt that every freeman retained in theory the right of appearing in the Assembly of the kingdom, no less than in the Assemblies of the mark and of the shire. Expressions are found which are quite enough to show that the mass of the people were theoretically looked on as present in the National Assembly and as consenting to its decrees. But such a right of attendance necessarily became purely nugatory. The mass of the people could not attend, they would not care to attend, they would find themselves of no account if they did attend. They would therefore, without any formal abrogation of their right, gradually cease from attending. The idea of representation had not yet arisen; those who did not appear in person had no means of appearing by deputy; of election or delegation there is not the slightest trace, though it might often happen that those who stayed away might feel that their rich or official neighbor who went would attend to their wishes and would fairly act in their interests. By this process an originally democratic assembly, without any formal exclusion of any class of its members, gradually shrank up into an aristocratic assembly.

I trust that I have shown in another work how, under closely

1 This was written before the local government acts, which reorganized the old system of county administration.

E

analogous circumstances, the Federal Assembly of Achaia, legally open to every Achaian citizen, was practically attended only by those who were both rich and zealous, and how it often happened that the members of the inner body, the Senate, themselves alone formed the Assembly. In the same way an assembly of all the freemen of Wessex, when those freemen could not attend personally, and when they had no means of attending by representatives, gradually changed into an assembly attended by few or none but the king's thegns. The great officers of Church and State, ealdormen, bishops, abbots, would attend; the ordinary thegns would attend more laxly, but still in considerable numbers; the king would preside; a few leading men would discuss; the general mass of the thegns, whether they formally voted or not, would make their approval or disapproval practically felt; no doubt the form still remained of at least announcing the resolutions taken to any of the ordinary freemen whom curiosity had drawn to the spot; most likely the form still remained of demanding their ceremonial assent, though without any fear that the habitual "Yea, yea," would ever be changed for "Nay, nay." It is thus that, in the absence of representation, a democratic franchise, as applied to a large country, gradually becomes unreal or delusive.

A primary assembly, an Ekklêsia, a Landesgemeinde, is an excellent institution in a commonwealth so small as to allow of its being really worked with effect. But in any large community it either becomes a tumultuous mob, like the later Roman Comitia or the Florentine Parliament, or else it gradually shrinks up into an aristocratic body, as the old Teutonic assemblies did both in England and on the Continent. When the great statesmen of the thirteenth century, Earl Simon and King Edward, fully established the principle of representation, they did but bring back the old state of things in another shape. The ordinary freeman had gradually lost his right of personal attendance in the National Assembly; it was expedient and impossible to restore that right to him in its original shape; he may be considered as having in the thirteenth century legally surrendered it, and as having received in its stead the far more practical right of attending by his representatives.

Thus was formed that famous Assembly of our forefathers, called by various names the Mycel Gemót or Great Meeting, the Witenagemót or Meeting of the Wise, sometimes the Mycel Getheaht or Great Thought. But the common title of those who compose it is simply the Witan, the Sapientes, or Wise Men. In every

English kingdom we find the royal power narrowly limited by the necessity under which the king lay, of acting in all matters of importance by the consent and authority of his Witan; in other words, of his Parliament. As the other kingdoms merged in Wessex, the Witan of the other kingdoms became entitled to seats in the Gemót of Wessex, now become the great Gemót of the empire. But just as in the case of the Assemblies of the mark and the shire, so the Gemóts of the other kingdoms seem to have gone on as local bodies, dealing with local affairs, and perhaps giving a formal assent to the resolutions of the central body.

As to the constitution of these great councils in any English kingdom, our information is of the vaguest kind. The members are always described in the loosest way. We find the Witan constantly assembling, constantly passing laws, but we find no law prescribing or defining the constitution of the Assembly itself. We find no trace of representation or election; we find no trace of any property qualification; we find no trace of nomination by the crown, except in so far as all the great officers of the court and the kingdom were constantly present. On the other hand, we have seen that all the leading men, ealdormen, bishops, abbots, and a considerable body of other thegns, did attend; we have seen that the people as a body were in some way associated with the legislative acts of their chiefs, that those acts were in some sort the acts of the people themselves, to which they had themselves assented, and were not merely the edicts of superiors which they had to obey. There is no doubt that, on some particular occasions, some classes at least of the people did actually take a part in the proceedings of the National Council; thus the citizens of London are more than once recorded to have taken a share in the election of kings.

No theory that I know of will explain all these phenomena except that which I have just tried to draw out. This is, that every freeman had an abstract right to be present, but that any actual participation in the proceedings of the Assembly had, gradually and imperceptibly, come to be confined to the leading men, to the king's thegns, strengthened under peculiarly favorable circumstances, by the presence of exceptional classes of freemen, like the London citizens. It is therefore utterly vain for any political party to try to press the supposed constitution of our ancient National Councils into the service of modern political warfare. The Meeting of the Wise has not a word to utter for or against any possible reform bill. In one sense it was more