y
on every reeve and ealdorman. But with a weak king the Crown was weak.
Ealdor-men, provincial witenagemots, local jurisdictions, ceased to move
at the royal bidding the moment the direct royal pressure was loosened or
removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old provincial jealousies, the old
tendency to severance and isolation lingered on and woke afresh when the
crown fell to a nerveless ruler or to a child. And at the moment we have
reached the royal power and the national union it embodied had to battle
with fresh tendencies towards national disintegration which sprang like
itself from the struggle with the northman. The tendency towards personal
dependence and towards a social organization based on personal dependence
received an overpowering impulse from the strife. The long insecurity of
a century of warfare drove the ceorl, the free tiller of the soil, to
seek protection more and more from the thegn beside him. The freeman
"commended" himself to a lord who promised aid, and as the price of this
shelter he surrendered his freehold to receive it back as a fief laden
with conditions of military service. The principle of personal allegiance
which was embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, itself tended to
widen into a theory of general dependence. From AElfred's day it was
assumed that no man could exist without a lord. The "lordless man" became
a sort of outlaw in the realm. The free man, the very base of the older
English constitution, died down more and more into the "villein," the man
who did suit and service to a master, who followed him to the field, who
looked to his court for justice, who rendered days of service in his
demesne. The same tendencies drew the lesser thegns around the greater
nobles, and these around the provincial ealdormen. The ealdormen had
hardly been dwarfed into lieutenants of the national sovereign before
they again began to rise into petty kings, and in the century which
follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian thegns following a Mercian or
Northumbrian ealdorman to the field though it were against the lord of
the land. Even the constitutional forms which sprang from the old English
freedom tended to invest the higher nobles with a commanding power. In
the "great meeting" of the Witenagemot or Assembly of the Wise lay the
rule of the realm. It represented the whole English people, as the
wise-moots of each kingdom represented the separate peoples of each; and
its powers were as supreme in