§ 1. Origin of the Old-English Kingship

What then was the nature, and what was the origin, of that kingship, which the election—the constrained and unwilling election, but still the election—of the Witan of all England did, on Midwinter-day, eight hundred years back, entrust to William, Duke of the Normans—from that day forward William, King of the English? That election transferred to him the same internal power over his own kingdom, the same external power over the dependent kingdoms, which had been held by Eadgar and Æthelred, and which an earlier forced election of a foreign conqueror had transferred to the hands of Cnut the Dane. |Summary of the growth of Wessex.| We have already traced the course of the events by which those powers, internal and external, grew up. Two Saxon chiefs, Ealdormen or Heretogan, formed a settlement on the |495.| south coast of Britain. After some years of successful |519.| warfare, they assumed the kingly title over their own tribe. One of their successors incorporated some of the |823–828.| other Teutonic kingdoms with his own realm, and obtained an external supremacy over all the other Teutons in the island and over a portion of the Celts. A series of his |878–954.| successors, after long struggles, incorporated all the Teutonic states into one kingdom, and obtained an external Empire over all the Celtic states. The Ealdorman of the Gewissas thus gradually grew into the King of the West-Saxons, the King of the Saxons, the King of the English, the Emperor of all Britain. The external aspect of this process, the dates of its several stages, I have already marked. I must now dwell a little longer on the real origin and nature of the various powers implied in those different descriptions of the ruler. Each stage marks an advance in the extent of territorial dominion; each stage marks also an advance in the amount of political authority enjoyed by the sovereign.

In following up these researches into our earliest political antiquities it is absolutely necessary to cast away all thoughts of modern political controversies. Time was when the whole fabric of our liberties was held to depend on the exact nature of the entry made by William the Bastard. Time was when supporters and opponents of parliamentary reform thought to strengthen their several positions by opposite theories as to the constitution of the Witenagemót. To this day a popular orator will sometimes think that he adds point to a declamation by bringing in Saxon Ælfred as the author of Trial by Jury, perhaps of every other privilege which other lands are held either not to possess or to have borrowed from ourselves. Every notion of this kind must be wholly cast away, if we would fairly and impartially learn what the institutions of our Teutonic forefathers really were. The lover of freedom certainly need not shrink from the inquiry. |The present shape of our political institutions not to be looked for in early times,| He will not indeed find that the finished systems of the nineteenth or of the seventeenth century were brought over ready made in the keels of Hengest and Horsa. He will not even find that they appeared in their perfect form in the Imperial Witenagemót of Eadgar the Peaceful. He will not find the legislative authority vested in a representative assembly to which every shire and borough sends the men of its choice. He will not find a King the freedom of whose will is at once hampered and protected by the tutelage of ministers responsible to that representative assembly. He will not find tribunals in which issues of law are determined by Judges independent alike of King and people, while issues of fact are determined by the people themselves in the form of jurors taken at haphazard from among them. Not one of these things will he find in the finished shape in which he is familiar |but the germs of later institutions may be traced from the beginning.| with them. But he will find the first principles from which all of them were derived; he will find the germs out of which all of them were developed. He will not find the relations of King, Lords, and Commons accurately balanced in the first Teutonic settlement on the shores of Kent. But he will find the rudiments of all three in days which were ancient in the days of Hengest. Let him go as far back as history or tradition throws any light on the institutions of our race, and he will find the germs alike of the monarchic, the aristocratic, and the democratic |Necessity of comparison with other Teutonic nations.| branches of our constitution. When positive evidence within our own land fails us, we must go for illustration and explanation, not to the facts, the theories, the controversies, of modern politics, but to the kindred institutions of the kindred nations of the mainland. Our Parliament is the true and lawful representative, by true and lawful succession, of the ancient Meeting of the Wise; but, if we would search out the origin and constitution of that Meeting of the Wise, we must go, not to the parliamentary traditions of the last six hundred years, but to the Marzfeld of the Frankish Kings, to the Landesgemeinden of Schwyz and Uri, to those yet earlier assemblies which still rise before us in full life in the pages of the first inquirer into the habits and institutions of our |Records of Teutonic Law from Tacitus onwards.| race. From the Germania of Tacitus onwards, through the Barbaric Codes, through the Capitularies of the Frankish Kings and Emperors, through the records of our own insular legislation from the Dooms of Æthelberht to the so-called Laws of Henry the First, we have a series of witnesses, showing what were the general principles of Teutonic law, and what were the particular forms which it took in particular times and places. In truth we may go beyond the records of our own immediate race. The early history of the Teuton is constantly illustrated by |Analogies with the Homeric Achaians.| the early history of his Aryan kinsmen, and the living picture of the old Achaians of Homer brings vividly before us many an institution of our own forefathers and many an incident of their early history.

The sketch which has been given in the last Chapter has shown that the Imperial lordship of all Britain, as held by Æthelstan and his successors, and even the supremacy of Wessex over the other English kingdoms, as established by Ecgberht, were institutions of comparatively late growth. But it must not be thought that even the full-grown local kingship, such as we find it held by Æthelberht in Kent and by Eadwine in Northumberland, was a thing which had been from the beginning. In the days of Tacitus some of the Teutonic tribes had kings and |Kingship not universal; government by Ealdormen or Heretogan.| others had not; in the time of Cæsar it would seem that kingship was the exception and not the rule. The chieftains of the first settlers in our own island bore no higher title than Ealdorman or Heretoga. These two names express two different sides of the same office. The same man is Ealdorman as a civil ruler and Heretoga as a military chieftain. The former name survives in our |Force and history of the names.| language, but with sadly diminished dignity; the title which once expressed a rank which, among worldly dignities, was inferior to kingship alone, has taken refuge with a class of municipal magistrates, reaching downwards to the pettiest boroughs. The other name, always much more rarely in use, has dropped altogether out of our tongue, while, among the continental Teutons, the cognate word Herzog expresses a dignity the distinction between which and modern kingship must be drawn by the courtier and not by the politician. The name of Ealdorman is one of a large class; among a primitive people age implies command and command implies age; hence, in a somewhat later stage of language, the elders are simply the rulers, and the eldest are the highest in rank, without any thought of the number of years which they may really have lived. |Import of the change from Ealdormen to Kings.| It is not perfectly clear in what the authority or dignity of the King exceeded that of the Ealdorman, but it is clear that the title of King did carry with it an advance in both respects. Even the smallest kingdom was probably formed by the union of the districts of several Ealdormen. It is probable too that the King was distinguished by some religious sanction of heathen times, analogous to the ecclesiastical consecration which in later times the Church bestowed on kings, but not on princes of lower rank. It is certain that kingship required descent from the Gods; it may be that no such divine origin was |Instances in Britain and elsewhere.| needed by the mere Ealdorman. At all events, we find the change from Ealdorman to Kings taking place in more than one kingdom of Teutonic Britain, as well as among many of the kindred tribes on the mainland. We have already seen that the kingdoms of Northumberland and East-Anglia were formed by the union of several smaller |The West-Saxon Ealdormen become Kings. 495–519.| states whose rulers did not assume the royal title. In Wessex the account is still more remarkable. Cerdic and Cynric entered the land with the title of Ealdorman; they did not assume kingship till after the arrival of fresh reinforcements, and till a decisive victory over the Welsh had strengthened their position in the country. During the whole period commonly called that of the Heptarchy the whole land was full of petty princes, some of whom undoubtedly bore the title of King, though others may have |Alleged return of Wessex to ealdormanship. 673–685.| reigned simply as Ealdormen. According to one account, the West-Saxons, as late as the seventh century, were for ten years without any common sovereign, while the Ealdormen or Under-kings reigned independently. This falling back on an older system has its parallels; there is one noted case in Lombard history; but it would be specially remarkable in a kingdom which had, from the beginning, greater |Distinction between King and Ealdorman from Ecgberht onwards.| unity than most of its fellows. But at least from the time of Ecgberht onwards there is a marked distinction between the King and the Ealdorman. The King is a sovereign, the Ealdorman is only a magistrate. The King may be hampered in the exercise of his power by the rights of his people or by the joint action of the great men of his realm; he may be chosen by his Witan and he may be liable to be deposed by them; still he is a sovereign, inasmuch as he does not rule by delegation from any personal superior. |Distinction between the Ealdorman and the dependent King.| He may even be, by original grant or more probably by commendation, dependent on some more powerful King; but even such dependence does not degrade him from his sovereign rank. His relation to his over-lord binds him to certain external services, but in his internal government he remains perfectly independent, with his power limited only by the laws of his own realm. But the Ealdorman has become distinctly a subject. He may hold the fullest royal power within his own district; he may be the descendant of former Ealdormen and even of former Kings; he may have a reasonable hope that he may hand on his dignity to his own children; still he is not a sovereign, but a subject. The King is supreme; the Ealdorman is simply sent by him. He is a Viceroy appointed by the King and his Witan; he is liable to be removed by them, and he is responsible to them for the exercise of his |Position of Ealdorman Æthelred in Mercia. 880–912.| authority. When the kingdom of Mercia was broken up, Ælfred entrusted the government of the part which fell to his share to his son-in-law Æthelred as Ealdorman. Æthelred was a man of royal descent; he exercised full royal power in Mercia; but he exercised it simply as a Governor General or Lord Lieutenant, the representative of a sovereign whose higher authority he carefully acknowledges |Case of Northumberland. 954.| in his charters. So, when Northumberland was finally incorporated with England under Eadred, kingship was abolished, and the government was entrusted to a magistrate with the title of Ealdorman or its Danish |Contrary process in the Empire.| equivalent Earl. By the exactly contrary process, Princes of the Empire, Dukes—that is, Ealdormen or Heretogan—and not only Dukes, but Counts, Margraves, Landgraves, all of them originally mere magistrates under the Emperor-King, have gradually grown into sovereign princes, and have at last, in several cases, ventured to assume the kingly title.

The mere title of King seems to be comparatively recent among the Teutonic nations. It is not found in the earliest Teutonic prose writing, the Gothic Gospels; but in our own language it seems to be as old as the English settlements in Britain. Most of the questions which have arisen as to the etymology of the word only show how modern a thing scientific etymology is. Cyning, by contraction King, comes from the same root as the word cyn or kin. And the connexion is not without an important meaning. The King is the representative of the race, |The Teutonic kingship national, not territorial.| the embodiment of its national being. A King, in the old Teutonic sense, is not the King of a country, but the King of a nation. Such titles as King of England or King of France are comparatively modern, and the idea which they express is equally so. The Teutonic King is not the lord of the soil, but the leader of the people. The idea of the King of a country would have been hardly intelligible to our forefathers. Every King is King of a people. He is King of Goths, Franks, Saxons, wherever Goths, Franks, Saxons, may happen to settle. The Goths and their Kings moved from the Danube to the Tiber, and from the Tiber to the Tagus; but Alaric and Athaulf were equally Kings of the Goths, in whatever quarter of the world the Goths might be. So in our own island, the King is King of the West-Saxons, Mercians, or Northumbrians. |No names for the English kingdoms as distinguished from the people.| In truth the countries themselves, as distinguished from their inhabitants, can hardly be said to have any names. We talk for convenience’ sake of Wessex, Mercia, and so forth; but the correct description is the Kingdom of the West-Saxons, the Kingdom of the Mercians. |The King is King of the English (not of England), but Emperor of Britain.| So, when the West-Saxon King had swallowed up all his brethren, he became, not King of England, but King of the English. It is only in their Imperial character, in their character, not as chiefs of a nation, but as lords over all the dwellers within the isle of Britain, that our Kings ever assume the territorial description. Indeed |Name of England hardly known.| England itself has hardly yet found a geographical name. Englaland is a late form, scarcely found before the Danish Conquest. The common name for the land is the name of the people, Angel-cyn.

The King’s power and dignity gradually grew. They grew by the mere extension of his dominions. The larger a prince’s territory becomes, the greater is the distance at which he finds himself from the mass of his subjects. He becomes more and more clothed with a sort of mysterious dignity; he comes to be more and more looked upon as something different from ordinary men, even from ordinary civil magistrates and military leaders. The prince of a small territory is known to all his people; he is, according to the character of his government, their personal friend or their personal enemy; if worthy himself and the descendant of worthy ancestors, he may command a strong feeling of clannish loyalty, but he cannot hedge himself in with the fence of any special divinity. A King who reigns over all Wessex is, in the nature of things, more of a King than one who reigns only over Wight, and a King who reigns over all England is more of a King than one who reigns only over Wessex. Through this cause only, every fresh addition of territory added fresh power and dignity to the Kings of the House of Cerdic in their progress from the ealdormanship of a corner of Hampshire to the Imperial crown of the Isle of Britain. But this cause was by no means the only one. The growth of the royal power was greatly helped by another cause, fully to understand which we must go back to the very earliest accounts which we have of the political |Two elements in Teutonic political life, the free Community and the Comitatus.| institutions of the Teutonic race. From the very beginning of our history two opposing elements may be seen, one of which in the end gained the complete mastery over the other. The one is the original self-governing Teutonic community; the other is the King or other lord with his personal following.