the earliest settler who had in
various ways forfeited their claim to a share in the original homestead,
or more probably from incomers into the village who had since settled
round it and been admitted to a share in the land and freedom of the
community. The eorl was distinguished from his fellow villagers by his
wealth and his nobler blood; he was held by them in an hereditary
reverence; and it was from him and his fellow aethelings that
host-leaders, whether of the village or the tribe, were chosen in times of
war. But this claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition
of his fellow villagers. Within the township every freeman or ceorl was
equal. It was the freeman who was the base of village society. He was the
"free-necked man" whose long hair floated over a neck which had never
bowed to a lord. He was the "weaponed man" who alone bore spear and
sword, and who alone preserved that right of self-redress or private war
which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless
outrage.

[Sidenote: Justice]

Among the English, as among all the races of mankind, justice had
originally sprung from each man's personal action. There had been a time
when every freeman was his own avenger. But even in the earliest forms of
English society of which we find traces this right of self-defence was
being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. The
"blood-wite" or compensation in money for personal wrong was the first
effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's
life and the freeman's limb had each on this system its legal price. "Eye
for eye," ran the rough code, and "life for life," or for each fair
damages. We see a further step towards the modern recognition of a wrong
as done not to the individual man but to the people at large in another
custom of early date. The price of life or limb was paid, not by the
wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the
wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged. Order and law were thus
made to rest in each little group of people upon the blood-bond which
knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by
all who were linked in blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been
done against all who were linked in blood to the sufferer from it. From
this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the
wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not