the theory, which was largely the outcome of reading democratic ideas of the nineteenth century into very scanty and fragmentary evidences, has been attacked during the last two decades with great energy and erudition. On the other hand, there has appeared an opposing view that the bulk of the English population is Celtic, and that Romano-Celtic institutions persisted in spite of the AngloSaxon conquest.

This controversy has not led to any very definite results, and the subjects of discussion have lost whatever moral value they were once supposed to have had, for no one now believes that the form of land tenure in Anglo-Saxon times, for example, throws any light at all on the present English land problem. It might as well be admitted that we can never know the numerical proportion of Celts and Teutons in the English nation, for there are no data on which to base a conclusion. While there is still a tendency to hold that the majority were Teutons, there is also a tendency to reject the theory that these Teutons had any particular genius for political liberty or any peculiar institutions which marked them off from other peoples in a primitive stage of culture. The best statement of the problem as it now stands is in a remarkable study of early English institutions by Professor Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond.

§ 1. Statement of the Two Theories1

We are told that "in spite of all the labor that has been spent on the early history of England, scholars are still at variance upon the most fundamental of questions: the question whether that history began with a population of independent freemen or with a population of dependent serfs." Some exception may be taken to this statement. No one denies that for the purposes of English history slavery is a primitive institution, nor that in the seventh and eighth centuries there were many slaves in England. On the other hand, no one will assert that we can ascertain, even approximately, the ratio that the number of slaves bore to the number of free men. Moreover, such terms as "dependent" and 1 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 221 ff.

1

"independent" are not words that we can profitably quarrel over, since they are inexact and ambiguous.

For all this, however, it may well be said that there are two main theories before the world. The one would trace the English manor back to the Roman villa, would think of the soil of England as being tilled from the first mainly by men who, when they were not mere slaves, were coloni ascript to the land. The other would postulate the existence of a large number of free men who with their own labor tilled their own soil, of men who might fairly be called free "peasant proprietors," since they were far from rich and had few slaves or servants, and yet who were no mere peasants, since they habitually bore arms in the national host. What may be considered for the moment as a variant on this latter doctrine would place the ownership of the soil, or of large tracts of the soil, not in these free peasants taken as individuals, but in free village communities.

§ 2. Argument for the Second Theory

Now we will say at once that the first of these theories we cannot accept if it be put forward in a general form, if it be applied to the whole or anything like the whole of England. Certainly we are not in a position to deny that in some cases a Roman villa having come into the hands of a Saxon chieftain, he treated the slaves and coloni that he found upon it in much the same way as that in which they had been theretofore treated, though even in such a case the change was in all probability momentous, since large commerce and all that large commerce implies had perished. But against the hypothesis that this was the general case, the English language and the names of our English villages are the unanswered protest. It seems incredible that the bulk of the population should have been of Celtic blood and yet that the Celtic language should not merely have disappeared, but have stamped few traces of itself upon the speech of the conquerors.

This we regard as an objection which goes to the root of the whole matter and which throws upon those who would make the English nation in the main a nation of Celtic bondmen, the burden of strictly proving their thesis. The German invaders must have been numerous. The Britons were no cowards. They contested the soil inch by inch. The struggle was long and arduous. What then, we must ask, became of the mass of the victors? Surely it is impossible that they at once settled down as the "dependent serfs" of their chieftains.

Again, though it is very likely that where we find a land of scattered steads and of isolated hamlets, there the Germanic conquerors have spared or have been unable to subdue the Britons or have adapted their own arrangements to the exterior framework that was provided by Celtic or Roman agriculture, still, until Meitzen has been refuted, we are compelled to say that our true villages, the nucleated villages with large "open fields," are not Celtic, are not Roman, but are very purely and typically German. But this is not all. Hereafter we shall urge some other objections. The doctrine in question will give no rational explanation of the state of things that is revealed to us by the Domesday Survey of the northern and eastern counties, and it will give no rational explanation of seignorial justice. This being so, we seem bound to suppose that at one time there was a large class of peasant proprietors, that is, of free men who tilled the soil that they owned, and to discuss the process which substitutes for peasant proprietorship the manorial organization.

83. Feudalism not Retrogression

Though we cannot deal at any length with a matter which lies outside the realm of legal history, we ought at once to explain that we need not regard this change as a retrogression. There are indeed historians who have not yet abandoned the habit of speaking of feudalism as though it were a disease of the body politic. Now the word "feudalism" is and always will be an inexact term, and, no doubt, at various times and places there emerge phenomena which may with great propriety be called feudal, and which come of evil and make for evil. But if we use the term, and often we do, in a very wide sense, if we describe several centuries as feudal, then feudalism will appear to us as a natural and even a necessary stage in our history; that is to say, if we would have the England of the sixteenth century arise out of the England of the eighth without passing through a period of feudalism, we must suppose many immense and fundamental changes in the nature of man and his surroundings.

If we use the term in this wide sense, then (the barbarian conquests being given us as an unalterable fact) feudalism means civilization, the separation of employments, the division of labor, the possibility of national defence, the possibility of art, science, literature, and learned leisure; the cathedral, the scriptorium, the library, are as truly the works of feudalism as is the

baronial castle. When therefore we speak, as we shall have to speak, of forces which make for the subjection of the peasantry to seignorial justice and which substitute the manor with its villeins for the free village, we shall - so at least it seems to us be speaking not of abnormal forces, not of retrogression, not of disease, but in the main of normal and healthy growth. Far from us indeed is the cheerful optimism which refuses to see that the process of civilization is often a cruel process; but the England of the eleventh century is nearer to the England of the nineteenth than is the England of the seventh nearer by just four hundred years.

CHAPTER II

OLD BRITAIN AND THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST

AMONG the historians who have adhered to the Teutonic theory of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, Dr. Stubbs stands preeminent for the most cautious and scholarly statement of the case. Like Green and others, he believed that the origins of English institutions were to be sought in the forests of Germany and, dismissing the old British and Roman periods with a few paragraphs, he devoted two chapters to the Germans in their continental home before taking up English history in Britain. His chapter on the migration and conquest contains the main points of his argument in the controversy, and it would be an interesting and profitable exercise for the student to turn to the original volume and examine the evidence upon which the conclusions rest.

§ 1. Conquest of Gaul and Britain Contrasted1

The fifth century saw the foundation of the Frank dominion in Gaul, and the first establishment of the German races in Britain. The former was effected in a single long reign, by the energy of one great ruling tribe, which had already modified its traditional usages, and now, by the adoption of the language and religion of the conquered, prepared the way for a permanent amalgamation with them. In this process, whilst the dominant tribe was to impose a new mould upon the material which Roman dominion had reduced to a plastic mass, it was in its turn to take forms which but for the pertinacious idiosyncracy of the Gallic genius, and the Roman training to which it had been subjected, it would never have taken. . .

The Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, although speaking the same language, worshipping the same gods, and using the same laws, had no political unity like the Franks of Clovis; they were not

1 Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, Vol. I, pp. 63 ff. By permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford.