extending over
vast districts, yet displayed in each spot characteristic weaknesses
which the hostility of every neighbour rendered fatal. Then the Romans
had introduced a military administrative constitution, which displaced
this tribal system, while it also subjected Britain to the universal
Empire, of which it formed only an unimportant province. A
characteristic form of life was first built up in Britain by the
Anglo-Saxons on the ruins of the Roman rule. The union into which they
entered with the civilised world was the freely chosen one of the
religion of the human race; they had no other connexion to control
them. Their whole energies being concentrated on the island, they gave
it for the first time, though continually at war with each other, an
independent position.

Their constitution combines the ideas of the army and the tribe: it is
the constitution of armies of colonists bringing with them domestic
institutions which had been theirs from time immemorial. A society of
freemen of the same stock, who divided the soil among themselves in
such a manner that the number of the hides corresponded to that of the
families (for among no people was there a stronger conception of
separate ownership), they composed the armed array of the country, and
by their union maintained that peace at home which again secured each
man's life and property. At their head stands a royal family, of the
highest nobility, which traces its origin to the gods, and has by far
the largest possessions; from it, by birth and by election combined,
proceeds the King; who then, sceptre in hand, presides in the court
of justice, and in the field has the banner carried before him; he is
the Lord, to whom men owe fidelity; the Guardian, to whom the public
roads and navigable rivers belong, who disposes of the undivided land.
Yet he does not stand originally so high above other men that his
murder cannot be expiated by a wergeld, of which one share falls to
his family--not a larger one than for any other of its members,--and
the other to the collective community, since the prince belongs to the
former by birth, to the latter by his office. Between the simple
freeman and the prince appear the eorls, ealdormen, and thanes, in
some instances raised above the mass by noble birth or by larger
possessions, natural chiefs of districts and hundreds, in others
promoted by service in the King's court and in the field, sometimes
specially bound to him by person