It is this spirit that gave the later English their religious earnestness. It is this spirit that explains the stern Puritan, the inspired Milton, the passionate Wesley, and the mystic Newman. It is this spirit too that explains the gloomy self-questioning of Hamlet, the superstitious terrors of Macbeth, the cruel accusations of witchcraft, the pitiless justice of Calvinism. It is this spirit that makes the Englishman of to-day so anxious to justify his WODEN, THE ALL-FATHER He is always shown as blind in one eye and attended by ravens. The winged hel met is typical of the North Teuton. actions by religious sanction. Foreigners accuse him of hypocrisy. They do not comprehend his instinct that the act of the day must be justified by eternal standards. Fairy tales are the heritage of all races. Certain types of tales are primarily Teutonic. The ogre, the gnome, the maliciously haunting ghost, are, for the greater part, it seems, derived from Saxon or Scandinavian sources. The classical Latin ghost might terrify; the classical Neither Cyclops might kill. could stir the hair with that sense of uncanny terror, that delight in horror, which the Saxon has passed down to his descendants. Love of The Saxons were a seafaring people. Their homes were by the sea; their travel was upon it, all their adventures lay over the blue sea-line. It was inwoven with the texture of their lives. Yet fa the Sea miliarity never made it common. The love of the sea runs through their poetry as a passion. They did not idealize it. They knew all its cruelties and its treacheries. In an old poem, The Seafarer, we read, I sailed among sorrows in seas many, The wild rise of the waves, the close watch of the night At the dark prow in danger of dashing on rock. . . . Nor so daring in deeds, nor so dear to his lord, That his soul never stirred when of sea-faring he thought.1 They knew it, at its best and at its worst, and loved it because they knew it. And the spirit of their love has never passed out of their writings. Sea-power! It is one long tale, from Alfred to the Armada, from the Armada to the ships that but now were defying the submerged death in the North Sea. Through all English poetry, from Beowulf to Kipling and Masefield, one finds our verse filled with the same passion. No less than the sea, the Saxon loved the soil, the land that was his own, the field that he himself had plowed. The true Saxon and true Englishman has Love of never been at heart a city-dweller. His the Soil house is his castle, and that house must stand upon a bit of soil that no one can take from him. In the whole political history of England much hinges upon this ownership of the soil and the right to the fruit taken from it. The right to the land played a leading part in early risings under John Ball and Wat Tyler. We find it in Gold 1 Slightly altered from Morley's translation in his English Writers. For the metrical form, see page 16ff. The italics indicate a lliterative structure. See page 17ff. smith's Deserted Village. We find it no less clearly in contests of the present century, with men marching to the song, The land, the land, the land on which we stand, God gave the land to the people! In the villager of to-day, in his cottage with its tiny garden and little allotment, and in the landed gentleman, with his oak-shaded acres, we find one common heritage from the Saxon yeomen. They were, from the first, says Green, "a race of land-holders and land-tillers." Instinct for Self-government The original unit of Saxon government was the small group of farmers, a cluster of "land-tillers." Each little farmer commonwealth" "was girt in by its own border or 'mark,' of forest or waste or fen, which parted it from its fellow villages. Inside this boundary the 'township,' as the village was then called, from the 'tun' or rough fence and trench that served as its simple fortification, formed a ready-made fortress in war. Within the village we find from the first a marked social difference between the two orders of its indwellers. The bulk of the homesteads were those of its freemen or 'ceorls'; but among these were the larger homes of 'eorls,' or men distinguished among their fellows by noble blood . . . from whom the leaders of the people were chosen in war-time or rulers in time of peace. But the choice was a purely voluntary one, and the man of noble blood enjoyed no legal privilege among his fellows. The holdings of the freeman clustered round a moot-hill or sacred tree where the community met from time to time to order its industry and to frame its own laws. . . . Here strife of farmer with farmer was stated according to the 'customs' of the township as its elder men' stated them, and the wrong-doer was judged and his fine assessed by the kinsfolk.” It is here that we see, in little, that idea of self-government by assembly and of trial by jury that was to expand until it took form in the Parliament of England and the Congress of the United States of America. It is not in the American colonies, but in the Saxon "tun," that we must look for the first inklings of the ideas of taxation and representation. In New England town government we find in the township, in the "common," land common to all, and in the "town meeting," remains of the old tradition. Even the palisade that kept out the Indians takes us back to the ancient trench and fence of the Saxon "tun." The idea that one man is as good as another is closely related to the idea of government by the people and for the people. Men of noble blood derived no Feeling of legal privilege from their social position. The Equality common man had not only the same legal rights as his "superior," but had an equal claim to self-respect. This feeling was curbed by feudal authority, but was never extinguished. Through all centuries one could find the sturdy laborer who never doubted that he was "as good as squire." And this feeling we may watch for centuries working its way to expression. It broke out briefly in John Ball and died. It broke out in Cromwell and passed again from sight. It came again in the deposition of James, in the Reform Bill of 1832, in the income tax contentions and labor troubles of the early twentieth century. And each time there was a gain that was not lost. England has had no violent revolution. Its idea of equality has always dwelt within it and has been patiently, age after age, working its way out. Comparatively soon after the coming of the Saxons to England, we find the "drift" to feudalism, not to a better Beginnings of order of society, but to an inferior form that Feudalism must be passed through. The power of the lords increased. The increase of slaves, whether beggared by need, or captured in war, increased the inequality. We see, then, as we approach the Norman Conquest, developing out of communities of free yeomen a new kind of government that one can hardly tell from the feudalism of the Norman. The old spirit, however, was not to die. English rights, like the English speech, might disappear from the surface, but would come forth again to claim their own. Other Between the coming of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman Conquest, there lies an interval of some five hundred years a longer time than that since. the settlement of North America by white men! In this interval the drift toward feudalism was not the only change. First came the introduction of Christianity, a change that in itself altered the whole spirit of life. Attending this new creed, there came the beginnings of a new learning. For with Christianity came monks and priests. With these came Latin, and with Latin came whatever learning the downfall of Rome had left. Slight Influence of Britons As has been pointed out, British England had been simply erased. "The whole organization of government and society disappeared with the people who used it." "The villas, the mosaics, the coins which we dig up in our fields, are no relics of our English fathers, but of a Roman world which our fathers' swords swept utterly away. Its law, its litera |