called the Engle, or "English" folk, the bulk of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the Rhine; on the other, the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe. North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low German branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the common name of "Englishmen." But each of them was destined to share in the conquest of the land in which we live ; and it is from the union of all of them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung.-History of the English People, § 10.

THE ENGLISH EORL, CEORL, LÆT AND SLAVE.

Of the temper and life of the folk in this Older England we know little. But from the glimpses that we catch of it when conquest had brought them to the shores of Britain, the political and social organization must have been that of the German race to which they belonged. In their villages lay ready formed the political and social life which is round us in the England of to-day. A belt of forest or waste parted each from its fellow-villages, and within this boundary, or "mark" the township, as the village was then called, from the tun, or rough fence, that served as its simple fortification, formed a complete and independent body, though linked by ties which were strengthened every day to the townships about it and the tribe of which it formed a part. Its social centre was the homestead, where the Ætheling or Eorl, a descendant of the first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood and the traditions of his fathers. Around this homestead or

athel, each in its little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of Freelings or Ceorls, men sprung, it may be, from descendants of the earliest settlers 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 noble blood; he was held by them in a hereditary reverence; and it was from him and his fellow-Æthelings 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.

Land, with the German race, seems at a very early time to have become everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom. The Freeman was strictly the free-holder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free member of the community to which he belonged became inseparable from the possession of his "holding" in it. But property had not as yet reached that stage of absolutely personal possession which the social philosophy of a later time falsely regarded as its earliest state. The wood-land and pasture-land of an English village were still undivided, and every free villager had the right of turning into it his cattle or swine. The meadow-land lay in like manner open and undivided from hay-harvest to spring. It was only when grass began to grow afresh that the common meadow was fenced off into grassfields, one for each household in the village; and when the hay-harvest was over, fence and division were at an end again. The plough-land alone was permanently allotted in equal shares both of corn-land and fallow

land to the families of the Freeman, though even the plough-land was subject to fresh division as the number of claimants grew greater or less.

It was this sharing the common land which marked off the Ceorl or free-man from the Lat, the tiller of land which another owned. As the Ceorl was the descendant of settlers who, whether from their earlier arrival or from kinship with the original settlers of the village, had been admitted to a share in its land and its corporate life, so the Læt was a descendant of later comers to whom such a share was denied, or in some cases, perhaps, of earlier dwellers from whom the land had been wrested by force of arms. In the modern sense of freedom the Læt was free enough. He had house and home of his own; his life and limb were secure as the Ceorl's, save as against his lord. It is probable, from what we see in later laws, that as time went on he was recognized among the three tribes as a member of the nation, summoned to the folk-moot, allowed equal right at law, and called like the full free-man to the husting. But he was unfree as regards law and land. He had neither part nor lot in the common land of the village. The ground which he had tilled he held of some free-man of the tribe to whom he paid rent in labor or in kind; and this man was his lord. Whatever rights the unfree villager might gain in the general social life of his fellow-villagers, he had no rights as against his lord. He could leave neither land nor lord at his will. He was bound to render due service to his lord in tillage or in fight. So long, however, as these services were done, the land was his own. His lord could not take it from him; and he was bound to give him aid and protection in exchange for his services.

Far different from the position of the Læt was that of the Slave, though there is no ground for believing that the slave class was other than a small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat; " the debtor, unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and spear, took up the laborer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinfolk

would not make up his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a father pressed by need sold children or wife into bondage. In any case the slave became part of the live-stock of the master's estate, to be willed away at death with the horse or ox, whose pedigree was kept as carefully as his own. His children were bondsmen like himself; even a freeman's children by a slave mother inherited the mother's taint. "Mine is the calf that is born of my cow," ran an English proverb. Slave cabins clustered around the homestead of every rich landowner; ploughman, shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd, and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman, sower, hayward, and woodward, were often slaves. It was not indeed slavery such as we have known in modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare ; if a slave was slain, it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his master could slay him if he would; it was but a chattel the less. The slave had no place in the justice-court, no kinsman to claim vengeance or guiltfine for his wrong. If a stranger slew him his lord claimed the damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, "his skin paid for him under his master's lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed beast, and when caught he might be flogged to death. If the wrong-doer were a woman-slave she might be burned.-History of the English People, §§ 11-15.

THE ROMAN DEACON AND THE ENGLISH SLAVES.

The strife between the conquering tribes which at once followed on their conquest of Britain was to bring about changes even more momentous in the development of the English people. While Jute and Saxon and Engle were making themselves masters of central and Southern Britain, the English who had landed on its northernmost shores had been slowly winning for themselves the coast district between the Forth and Tyne which bore the name of Bernicia. Their progress seems to have been small till they were gathered into a kingdom in 547 by Ida the "Flame-bearer," who found a site for his king's town on the impregnable rock of Bamborough; nor was it until the reign of his fourth

son, Æthelric, that they gained full mastery over the Britons along their western border. But once masters of the Britains, the Bernician Englishmen turned to conquer their English neighbors to the south, the men of Deira, whose first king, Ælla, was now sinking to the grave.

The struggle filled the foreign markets with English slaves, and one of the most memorable stories in our history shows us a group of such captives as they stood in the market-place at Rome, it may be in the great Forum of Trajan, which still in its decay recalled the glories of the Imperial City. Their white bodies, their fair faces, their golden hair, was noted by a deacon who passed by. "From what country do these slaves come?" Gregory asked the trader who brought them. The slave-dealer answered, "they are English," or as the word ran in the Latin form it would bear at Rome, "They are Angles." The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic humor. "Not Angles, but angels," he said; "with faces so angel-like! From what country come they?" "They come," said the merchant, "from Deira." "De ira!" was the untranslatable word-play of the vivacious Roman; "aye, plucked from God's ire and called to Christ's mercy! And what is the name of their king?" They told him "Ælla," and Gregory seized on the word as of good omen. "Alleluia shall be sung in Ella's land," he said, and passed on, musing how the angel-faces should be brought to sing it.-History of the English People, § 40.

THE KINGDOM OF NORTHUMBRIA BECOMES CHRISTIAN.

Kent had bound itself to Eadwine, King of Northumbria, by giving him its king's daughter as a wife-a step which probably marked political subordination; and with the Kentish queen had come Paulinus, one of Augustine's followers, whose tall, stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling round a thin, worn face, were long remembered in the North. Moved by his queen's prayers, Eadwine promised to become Christian if he returned successful from Wessex; and the wise men of Northumbria gathered to deliberate on