he could be said to be the head of a later mediæval Parliament. The king and his Witan acted together; the king could do nothing without the Witan, and the Witan could do nothing without the king; they were no external, half-hostile body; they were his own Council, surrounding and advising him. Direct collisions between the king on the one hand and an united Gemót on the other were not likely to be common. This is indeed mere conjecture, but it is a conjecture to which the phenomena of the case seem inevitably to lead us. But of the great powers of the Witenagemót, of its direct participation in all important acts of government, there can be no doubt at all. The fact is legibly written in every page of our early history.

§ 4. Antiquity of English Liberties

The vast increase of the power of the crown after the Norman Conquest, the gradual introduction of a systematic feudal jurisprudence, did much to lessen the authority and dignity of the National Councils. The idea of a nation and its chief, of a king and his counsellors, almost died away; the king became half despot, half mere feudal lord. England was never without National Assemblies of some kind or other, but from the Conquest in the eleventh century till the second birth of freedom in the thirteenth, our National Assemblies do not stand out in the same distinct and palpable shape in which they stand out both in earlier and in later times. Here again we owe our thanks to those illustrious worthies, from the authors of the Great Charter onwards, who, in so many ways, won back for us our ancient constitution in another shape. I have said that no political party can draw any support for its own peculiar theories from that obscurest of subjects, the constitution of the Witenagemót. But no lover of our historic liberties can see without delight how venerable a thing those liberties are, how vast and how ancient are the rights and powers of an English Parliament. Our ancient Gemóts enjoyed every power of a modern Parliament, together with some powers which modern Parliaments shrink from claiming. Even such a matter of detail as the special security granted to the persons of members of the two houses has been traced, and not without a show of probability, to an enactment which stands at the very front of English secular jurisprudence, the second among the laws ordained by our first Christian king and the Witan of his kingdom of Kent.

5. Importance of the Personal Character of the King

As the powers of the Witan were thus extensive, as the king could do no important act of government without their consent, some may hastily leap to the conclusion that an ancient English king was a mere puppet in the hands of the National Council. No inference could be more mistaken. Nothing is clearer in our earlier history than the personal agency of the king in everything that is done, and the unspeakable difference between a good and a bad king. The truth is that in an early state of society almost everything depends on the personal character of the king. An able king is practically absolute; under a weak king the government falls into utter anarchy and chaos. Change the scene, as we shall presently do in our narrative, from the days of Eadgar to those of Æthelred; change it again from the long, dreary, hopeless reign of Æthelred to the few months of superhuman energy which form the reign of the hero Eadmund; compare the nine months of Harold with the two months which followed his fall, and we shall see how the whole fate of the nation turned upon the personal character of its sovereign.

With such witnesses before us, we can the better understand how our forefathers would have scouted the idea if the idea had ever occurred to them of risking the destiny of the nation on the accidents of strict hereditary succession, and how wisely they determined that the king must be, if not the worthiest of the nation, at any rate the worthiest of the royal house. The unhappy reign of Æthelred showed the bad side of even that limited application of the hereditary principle which was all that they admitted. Under her great kings, England had risen from her momentary overthrow to an imperial dominion. At home she possessed a strong and united government; and her position in the face of other nations was one which made her alliance to be courted by the foremost princes of Europe. The accession of the minor son of Eadgar, a child who, except in his crimes and vices, never went beyond childhood, dragged down the glorious fabric into the dust, so greatly did national welfare and national misfortune depend on the personal character of the king.

The king, it is true, could do nothing without his Witan, but as his Witan could do nothing without him, he was not a shadow or a puppet, but a most important personal agent. He was no more a puppet than the leader of the House of Commons is a puppet. We may be sure that the king and his immediate advisers always

had a practical initiative, and that the body of the Witan did little but accept or reject their proposals. We may be sure that a king fit for his place, an Ælfred or an Æthelstan, met with nothing that could be called opposition, but wielded the Assembly at his will. Princes invested with far smaller constitutional powers than those of an ancient English king have become the ruling spirits of commonwealths which denied them any sort of independent action.

When a great king sat upon the West-Saxon throne we may be sure that, while every constitutional form was strictly observed, the votes of the Witan were guided in everything by the will of the king. But when the king had no will, or a will which the Witan could not consent to, then of course the machine gave way and nothing was to be seen but confusion and every evil work. Again, the king was not only the first mover, he was also the main doer of everything. The Witan decreed, but it was the king who carried out their decrees. Weighty as was the influence of his personal character on the nature of the resolutions to be passed, its influence was weightier still on the way in which those resolutions were to be carried out. Under a good king, council and execution went hand in hand; under a weak or wicked king, there was no place found for either. Sometimes disgraceful resolutions were passed; sometimes wise and good resolutions were never carried into effect. The Witan under Æthelred sometimes voted money to buy off the Danes; sometimes they voted armies to fight against them; but, with Ethelred to carry out the decrees, it mattered little what the decrees were.

Add to all this the enormous influence which attached to the king from his having all the chief men of the land bound to him by the personal tie of thegnship. He was the Cyne-hlaford, at once the king of the nation and the personal lord of each individual. Though his grants of folkland and his nominations to the highest offices required the assent of the Witan, yet in these matters, above all, his initiative would be undoubted; the Witan had only to confirm and they would seldom be tempted to reject the proposals which the king laid before them. He was not less the fountain of honor and the fountain of wealth, because in the disposal of both he had certain decent ceremonies to go through. Add to all this, that in unsettled times there is a special chance, both of acts of actual oppression which the law is not strong enough to redress, and of acts of energy beyond the law which easily win popular condonation in the case of a victorious and beloved monarch.

Altogether, narrowly limited as were the legal powers of an ancient English king, his will, or lack of will, had the main influence on the destinies of the nation, and his personal character was of as much moment to the welfare of the State as the personal character of an absolute ruler.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Kemble, Saxons in England, Vol. II, chaps. i and vi, exaggerates the importance of the Witan. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chap. vi, based largely on Kemble. Chadwick, Studies in Anglo-Saxon Institutions (1905), chap. ix and Excursus IV.

PART II

FEUDALISM AND NATIONALISM

CHAPTER I

THE MEN OF LONDON AND THE CORONATION OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

THE Norman Conquest is one of the most striking events in English history, and doubtless it constituted one of the greatest crises in that history, in so far as it brought England into closer contact with continental life and ecclesiastical polity and gave the nation a stronger and better-organized central government. It is difficult to determine, however, just what precise results are to be attributed to that Conquest. Life in town and country probably flowed along in the old course, and a strong king might have been evolved from among the contending princes after Edward the Confessor's death. Such speculation is nevertheless idle, as William of Normandy determined to secure the crown for himself, and, armed by the pope's sanction, he and his followers struck the first blow for the throne at the battle of Hastings. Not long afterwards the metropolis of the realm yielded to the conqueror.

§ 1.

The Conqueror's Preparations for the Capture of London1 The men of London, whose forefathers had beaten back Swegen and Cnut, whose brothers had died around the standard of Harold, were not men to surrender their mighty city, defended by its broad river and its Roman walls, without at least meeting the invader in the field. William, master of Dover, Canterbury, and

1 Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, Vol. III, chap. xvi. By permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford.