§ 3. Origin and Powers of the Witenagemót

By these means those great kingdoms were formed which produced Bretwaldas and which strove for the supremacy of Britain. Each stage of union increased the kingly power; each stage lessened the independence of local communities and lessened the importance of their |Democratic constitution of the old Assemblies.| individual members. The democratic character of the old Teutonic system contained the seeds of its own destruction, whenever it should be applied to districts of any great extent. We may be sure that every Teutonic freeman had |The Assembly of the Mark,| a voice in the assembly—the Gemót, the Gemeinde, the Ekklêsia—of his own mark. In fact he in some sort keeps it still, as holding his place in the parish vestry. He had a voice; it might be too much to say that he had a vote; for in an early state of things formal divisions are not likely to be often taken; the temper of the assembly is found out by easier means. But the man who clashed his arms to express approval, or who joined in the unmistakeable sound which expressed dissent, practically gave as efficient a vote as if he had solemnly walked out into a lobby. The Homeric Agorê is the type of every such assembly, and the likeness of the Homeric Agorê may |of the Shire.| be seen in an English county-meeting to this day. The voice which the simple freeman, the ceorl, had in the assembly of his mark, he would not lose in the assembly of his shire, the Scirgemót. The county court is to this |The right becomes less valuable with each extension of area.| day an assembly of all the freeholders of the shire. But the right of attending the assembly of the shire would become really less valuable than the right of attending the assembly of the mark. The larger the assembly, the more distant the place of meeting, the more difficult, and therefore the more rare, does the attendance of individual members become, and the smaller is the importance of each individual member when he gets there. We cannot doubt that the assemblies of the mark, of the shire, and of the kingdom all went on side by side: but at each stage of union the competence of the inferior assembly |Every freeman had a theoretical right to attend the National Assembly.| would be narrowed. We cannot doubt that every freeman kept in theory the right of appearing in the assembly of the kingdom, no less than in the assemblies of the mark and of the shire. Expressions are found which are quite enough to show that the mass of the people were theoretically looked on as present in the national assembly and as consenting to its decrees. But such a right of |The right goes practically out of use.| attendance necessarily became a mere name. The mass of the people could not attend; they would not care to attend, they would find themselves of no account if they did attend. They would therefore, without any formal abrogation of their right, gradually cease from attending. The idea of representation had not yet arisen; those who did not appear in person had no means of appearing by deputy; of election or delegation there is not the slightest trace, though it might often happen that those who stayed away might feel that their rich or official neighbour who went would attend to their wishes and would fairly act in their interests. By this process an originally democratic assembly, without any formal exclusion of any class of its members, gradually shrank up into an aristocratic assembly. I trust that I have shown in another work how, under closely analogous circumstances, the Federal Assembly of Achaia, legally open to every Achaian citizen, was commonly attended only by those who were both rich and zealous, and how it often happened that the members of the inner body, the Senate, themselves alone formed the |The Assembly practically an Assembly of the King’s Thegns.| assembly. In the same way, an assembly of all the freemen of Wessex, when those freemen could not attend personally and when they had no means of attending by representatives, gradually changed into an assembly attended by few or none but the King’s Thegns. The great officers of Church and State, Ealdormen, Bishops, Abbots, would attend; the ordinary Thegns would attend more laxly, but still in considerable numbers; the King would preside; a few leading men would discuss; the general mass of the Thegns, whether they formally voted or not, would make their approval or disapproval practically felt; |Vestiges of the old popular rights.| no doubt the form still remained of at least announcing the resolutions taken to any of the ordinary freemen whom curiosity had drawn to the spot; most likely the form still remained of demanding their ceremonial assent, though without any fear that the habitual “Yea, yea,” would ever be exchanged for “Nay, nay.” It is thus that, in the absence of representation, a democratic franchise, as applied to a large country, gradually becomes unreal or delusive. |Primary Assemblies suited only to small commonwealths.| A primary assembly, an Ekklêsia, a Landesgemeinde, is an excellent institution in a commonwealth so small as to allow of its being really worked with effect. But in any large community it either becomes a tumultuous mob, like the later Roman Comitia or the Florentine Parliament, or else it gradually shrinks up into an aristocratic body, as the old Teutonic assemblies did both in England and on the continent. When the great statesmen of the thirteenth century, Earl Simon and King Edward, fully established the principle of representation, they did but |The Ancient right restored in another shape in the thirteenth century.| bring back the old state of things in another shape. The ordinary freeman had gradually lost his right of personal attendance in the national assembly; it was inexpedient and impossible to restore that right to him in its original shape; he may be looked on as having in the thirteenth century legally surrendered it, and as having received in its stead the far more practical right of attending by his representatives.

Thus was formed that famous assembly of our forefathers, called by various names, the Mycel Gemót or Great Meeting, the Witenagemót or Meeting of the Wise, sometimes the Mycel Getheaht or Great Thought. |The Witenagemót.| But the common title of those who compose it is simply the Witan, the Sapientes or Wise Men. In every English kingdom we find the royal power narrowly limited by the necessity under which the King lay of acting in all matters of importance by the consent and authority of his Witan, in other words, of his Parliament. |The Gemót of Wessex becomes the general Legislature, those, of the other kingdoms surviving as local bodies.| As the other kingdoms merged in Wessex, the Witan of the other kingdoms became entitled to seats in the Gemót of Wessex, now become the common Gemót of the Empire. But just as in the case of the assemblies of the mark and the shire, so the Gemóts of the other Kingdoms seem to have gone on as local bodies, dealing with local affairs, and perhaps giving a formal assent to the resolutions of the central body. |Lack of information as to the constitution of the Assembly.| As to the constitution of these great councils in any English kingdom our information is of the vaguest kind. The members are always spoken of in the loosest way. We find the Witan constantly assembling, constantly passing laws, but we find no law prescribing or defining the constitution of the assembly itself. We find no trace of representation or election; we find no trace of any property qualification; we find no trace of nomination by the crown, except in so far as all the great officers of the court and the kingdom were constantly present. On the other hand we have seen that all the leading men, Ealdormen, Bishops, Abbots, and a considerable body of other Thegns, did attend; we have seen that the people as a body had in some way a share in the legislative acts of their chiefs, that those acts were in some sort the acts of the people themselves, to which they had themselves assented, and were not merely the edicts of superiors which they had to obey. There is no doubt that, on some particular occasions, some classes at least of the people did actually take a part in the proceedings of the national council; thus the citizens of London are more than once recorded to have taken a share in the election of Kings. No theory that I know of will explain all these phænomena except that which I have just tried to draw out. This is, that every freeman had an abstract right to be present, but that any actual share in the proceedings of the assembly had, gradually and imperceptibly, come to be confined to the leading men, to the King’s Thegns, strengthened, under peculiarly favourable circumstances, by the presence of exceptional classes of freemen, like the London citizens. It is therefore utterly vain for any political party to try to press the supposed constitution of our ancient national councils into the service |The Witenagemót proves nothing in modern political controversies.| of modern political warfare. The Meeting of the Wise has not a word to utter for or against any possible Reform Bill. In one sense it was more democratic than anything that the most advanced Liberal would dare to dream of; in another sense it was more oligarchic than anything that the most unbending Conservative would dare to defend. Yet it may in practice have fairly represented the wishes of the nation; and if so, no people ever enjoyed more complete political freedom, than the English did in these early times. |Extent of the powers of the Assembly; greater than those of a modern Parliament.| For the powers of the ancient Witenagemót surpassed beyond all measure the powers which our written law vests in a modern Parliament. In some respects they surpassed the powers which our conventional constitution vests in a modern House of Commons. The King could do absolutely nothing without the consent of his Wise Men. First of all, it was from them that he derived his political being, and it was on them that he depended for its continuance. The Witan chose the King and the |Power of deposing the King.| Witan could depose him. The power of deposition is a power which, from its very nature, can be exercised but rarely; we therefore do not find many Kings deposed by Act of Parliament either before or since the Norman Conquest. But we do find instances, both before and since the Norman Conquest, which show that, by the ancient constitution of England, the Witan of the land did possess the right of deposing the sovereign, and that on great and emergent occasions they did not shrink from exercising that right. I will not attempt to grapple with the confused history of Northumberland, where at one time Kings were set up |Instances in Northumberland;| and put down almost daily. Such revolutions were doubtless as much the result of force as of any legal process; still we can hardly doubt that the legal forms were commonly observed, and sometimes we find it distinctly recorded that they were. Let us keep ourselves to the more certain history of the line of Cerdic. Five times—we |in Wessex.| might more truly say six times—thrice before and twice since the Norman Conquest, has the King of the West-Saxons or of the English been deprived of his |Sigeberht. 755.| kingly office by the voice of his Parliament. Sigeberht of Wessex, in the eighth century, was deposed by the vote of the general assembly of his kingdom, and another King |Æthelred deposed, 1013; restored, 1014.| was elected in his stead. Æthelred the Second was deposed by one act of the Legislature and restored by another. Harthacnut, in the like sort, was deposed, while still uncrowned, from his West-Saxon kingdom, though he |Harthacnut deposed, 1037; re-elected, 1040.| was afterwards re-elected to the whole kingdom of England. |Edward the Second deposed, 1327; Richard the Second, 1377.| Edward the Second was deposed by Parliament; so was Richard the Second. At a later time the Parliament |Case of James the Second.| of England shrank from the formal deposition of James the Second, and took refuge in a theory of abdication which, though logically absurd, practically did all that was wanted. But the Parliament of Scotland had no such scruples, and that body, in full conformity with ancient examples, declared the crown of Scotland to be forfeited. In a land where everything goes by precedent, a right resting on a tradition like this, though its actual exercise may have taken place only five or six times in nine hundred years, is surely as well established as any other. Under our modern constitution the right is likely to remain dormant. The objects which in past times required the deposition of the King, if not from his office, at least from his authority, can now be gained by a parliamentary censure of the Prime Minister, or in the extremest case by bringing an impeachment against him.

If the Witan could depose the King, still more undoubtedly did the Witan elect the King. It is strange how people’s eyes are blinded on this subject. It is not uncommon to hear people talk about the times before and shortly after the Norman Conquest as if the Act for the Settlement of the Royal Succession had already been in force in those days. It is strange to hear a number of princes, both before and since the Conquest, popularly spoken of as “usurpers,” merely because they came to the crown in a different way from that which modern law and |Popular misconceptions on this subject.| custom prescribe. It is strange that people who talk in this way commonly forget that their own principle, so far as it proves anything, proves a great deal more than they intend. If Harold, Stephen, John, were usurpers, Ælfred and Eadward the Confessor were usurpers just as much. Ælfred and Eadward, no less than John, succeeded by election, to the exclusion of nephews whom the modern law of England would look upon as the undoubted heirs of the crown. It is stranger still to hear others talk as if hereditary succession, according to some particular theory of it, was a divine and eternal law which could not be departed from without sin. Those who talk in this way should at least tell us what the divine and unchangeable law of succession is; for in a purely historical view of things, nearly every kingdom seems to have a law of succession of its own. Our forefathers at any rate knew nothing of any such superstitions. The ancient English kingship was elective. It was elective in the same sense in which all the old Teutonic kingdoms were elective. Among a people in whose eyes birth was highly valued, it was deemed fitting that the King should be the descendant of illustrious and royal forefathers. In the days of heathendom it was held that the King should come of the supposed |Kings commonly chosen out of a particular family.| stock of the Gods. Thus in every kingdom there was a kingly house, out of which alone, under all ordinary circumstances, Kings were chosen; but within that kingly house the Witan of the land had a free choice. The |The eldest son of the last King has a preference, but no more.| eldest son of the last King would doubtless always have a preference; if he was himself at all worthy of the place, if his father’s memory was at all cherished, he would commonly be preferred without hesitation, probably chosen without the appearance of any other candidate. But a preference was all to which he was entitled, and he seems not to have been entitled even to a preference unless he |Minors constantly passed by.| was actually the son of a crowned King. If he were too young, or otherwise disqualified, the electors passed him by and chose some worthier member of the royal family. Ælfred and Eadred were chosen in preference to the minor sons of elder brothers. Eadward the Confessor was chosen in preference to the absent son of an elder brother. At the death of Eadgar, when the royal family contained only minors to choose from, the electors were divided between the elder and the younger brother. Minors who had been once passed by might or might not be elected at a later vacancy. Æthelwold, the son of Æthelred the First, who had been passed by in favour of his uncle Ælfred, was again passed by on Ælfred’s death, because no claim could compare with that of Eadward, the worthy son of the most glorious of fathers. The children of Eadmund were passed by in favour of their uncle Eadred, but on Eadred’s death the |A certain preference acquired by the recommendation of the last King.| choice fell on the formerly excluded Eadwig. And as a certain preference was acquired by birth, a certain preference was acquired by the recommendation of the late King. So Eadgar recommended his elder son Eadward to the electors; so Eadward the Confessor recommended Harold. Æthelwulf had long before attempted, by the help of a will confirmed by the Witan, to establish a peculiar law of succession, which soon broke down. But it is clear that a certain importance was attached to the wishes of a deceased and respected King, as conveying a distinct preference. But it conveyed nothing more than a preference; the person who enjoyed such preference, whether by birth or by nomination, could still be passed by without breach of constitutional right. From these principles it follows that, as any disqualified person in the kingly house might be passed by, so, if the whole house were disqualified, the whole house might be passed by. |Harold the son of Godwine lawfully chosen.| That is to say, the election of Harold the son of Godwine, the central point of this history, was perfectly good in every point of view. The earlier election of Cnut was |Cnut’s election good in form, but made under duresse.| equally good in point of form; only it was an election under duresse—duresse a little, but not much, stronger than that under which an English Chapter elects its Bishop.

An ancient English King then was, not the father of his people, but their child, their creation. And the assembly which had elected him, and which could depose him, claimed to direct him by its advice and authority |Direct share of the Witan in every branch of government.| in almost every exercise of the kingly power. Every act of government of any importance was done, not by the King alone, but by the King and his Witan. The Great Council of the nation took an active share even in those branches of government which modern constitutional theories mark out as the special domain of the Executive. That laws were ordained, and taxes imposed, by the authority of the Witan, that they sat as the highest court for the trial of exalted and dangerous offenders, is only what we should look for from the analogy of modern times. It is more important to find that the King and his Witan, and not the King alone, concluded treaties, made grants of folkland, ordained the assemblage of fleets and armies, appointed and deposed the great officers of Church and State. Of the exercise of all these powers by the assembled Witan we shall find abundant examples in the course of this history. Now these are the very powers which a modern House of Commons shrinks from |Difference between the direct and indirect action of Parliament.| directly exercising. These are the powers which, under our present system, Parliament prefers to entrust to ministers in whom it has confidence, ministers whom it virtually appoints, and whom it can virtually dismiss without any formal ceremony of deposition. And, in our present state of things, little or no harm, and some direct good, comes from Parliament preferring an indirect course of action |Direct action necessary in early times.| on these subjects. But in an earlier state of things, a more direct agency of the Parliament or other national assembly is absolutely necessary. The assembly has to deal, not with a ministry whom it can create and destroy without any formal action, but with a personal King, whom it has indeed elected and whom it can depose, but whose election and deposition are solemn national acts, his deposition indeed being the rarest and most extreme of all national acts. In such a state of things the power of the King may be strictly limited by law; but, within the limits which the law prescribes to him, he acts according to his own will and pleasure, or according to the advice of counsellors who are purely of his own choosing. In such a state of things the King and the nation are brought face to face, and it is needful that the national assembly should have a much more direct control over affairs than is at all needful when the ingenious device of a responsible ministry is interposed between King and Parliament. Long after the days of our ancient Witenagemóts, in the days of Edward the Third for instance, Parliament was consulted about wars and negotiations in a much more direct way than it is now. The control of Parliament over the Executive is certainly not less effective now than it was then; but the nature of our present system makes it desirable that the control of Parliament should be exercised in a less direct way than it was then. Our present system avoids, above all things, all possibility of direct personal collision between Parliament and the sovereign. But such direct personal collisions form the staple of English history from the thirteenth century onwards. In earlier times we seldom come across any record of the debates of our national councils, though we often know their determinations. How far such collisions commonly took place in early times we have but small means of knowing. They were perhaps less to be looked for in the tenth or eleventh century than in the thirteenth or fourteenth. In the later times the King had to deal with his Parliament as with something external to himself, something which laid petitions before him which he could accept or reject at pleasure. A struggle in those days was a struggle between the King and an united Parliament. Nowadays, as we all know, the struggle takes place within the walls of Parliament itself. But we can well believe that, in this respect as in so many others, the earliest times were really more like our own |Joint action of the King and the Witan.| than the intermediate centuries were. An ancient Witenagemót did not petition; it decreed; it confirmed the acts of the King which, without the assent of the Witan, had no validity; it was not a body external to the King, but a body of which the King was the head in a much more direct sense than he could be said to be the head of a later mediæval Parliament. The King and his Witan acted together; the King could do nothing without the Witan, and the Witan could do nothing without the King; they were no external, half-hostile, body; they were his own council, surrounding and advising him. Direct collisions between the King on the one hand and an united Gemót on the other were not likely to be common. And as to the great powers of the Witenagemót, as to its direct participation in all important acts of government, there can be no doubt. They are legibly |Diminution of parliamentary action after the Conquest.| written in every page of our early history. The vast increase of the power of the crown after the Norman Conquest, the gradual growth of a systematic feudal jurisprudence, did much to lessen the authority and dignity of the national councils. The idea of a nation and its chief, of a King and his counsellors, almost died away; the King became half despot, half mere feudal lord. England was never without national assemblies of some kind or other; but from the Conquest in the eleventh century till the second birth of freedom in the thirteenth, our national assemblies do not stand out in the same distinct and living shape in which they stand out both in earlier |The old freedom won back in the thirteenth century.| and in later times. Here again we owe our thanks to those illustrious worthies, from the authors of the Great Charter onwards, who, in so many ways, won back for us our ancient constitution in another shape. I have said that no political party can draw any support for its own peculiar theories from that obscurest of subjects, the constitution of the Witenagemót. But no lover of our old historic freedom can see without delight how venerable a thing that freedom is, how vast and how ancient are the rights and powers of an English Parliament. Our ancient Gemóts enjoyed every power of a modern Parliament, together with some powers which modern Parliaments shrink from claiming. Even such a matter of detail as the special security granted to the persons of members of the two Houses has been traced, and not without a show of probability, to an enactment which stands at the very front of English secular jurisprudence, the second among the laws ordained by our first Christian King and the Witan of his kingdom of Kent.

As the powers of the Witan were thus extensive, as the King could do no important act of government without their consent, some may hastily leap to the conclusion that an ancient English King was a mere puppet in the hands of the national council. No inference could be more mistaken. Nothing is clearer in our early history than the personal agency of the King in everything that is done, and the unspeakable difference between a good and |Vast importance of the personal character of the King.| a bad King. The truth is that in an early state of society almost everything depends on the personal character of the King. An able King is practically absolute; under a weak King the government falls into utter anarchy. Change the scene, as we shall presently do in our narrative, from the days of Eadgar to those of Æthelred—change it again from the long, dreary, hopeless, reign of Æthelred to the few months of ceaseless energy which form the reign of the hero Eadmund—compare the nine months of Harold with the two months which followed his fall—and we shall see how the whole fate of the nation turned upon the personal character of its sovereign. With such witnesses before us, we can the better understand how our forefathers would have scouted the thought—if the thought had ever occurred to them—of risking the destiny of the nation on the accidents of strict hereditary succession, and how wisely they determined that the King must be, if not the worthiest of the nation, at any rate the worthiest of the kingly house. The unhappy reign of Æthelred showed the bad side of even that limited application of the hereditary principle which was all that they admitted. Under her great Kings England had risen from her momentary overthrow to an Imperial dominion. At home she had a strong and united government, and her position in the face of other nations was one which made her alliance to be courted by the foremost princes of Europe. The accession of the minor son of Eadgar, a child who, except in his crimes and vices, never got beyond childhood, dragged down the glorious fabric into the dust. So greatly did national welfare and national misfortune depend on the personal character of the King. The King, it is true, could do nothing without his Witan; but as his Witan could do nothing without him, he was not a shadow or a puppet, but a most important personal agent. He was no more a puppet than the Leader of the House of Commons is a puppet. We may be sure that the King and his immediate advisers always had a practical initiative, and that the body of the Witan did little but accept |Overwhelming personal influence of an able King.| or reject their proposals. We may be sure that a King fit for his place, an Ælfred or an Æthelstan, met with nothing that could be called opposition, but wielded the assembly at his will. Princes clothed with far smaller constitutional powers than those of an ancient English King have become the ruling spirits of commonwealths which denied them any kind of independent action. Agêsilaos guided the policy of Sparta, and Francesco Foscari guided the policy of Venice, with a personal influence almost as commanding as that which Periklês exercised in the pure democracy of Athens or Aratos in the mixed constitution of the Achaian League. So when a great King sat on the West-Saxon throne, we may be sure that, while every constitutional form was strictly observed, the votes of the Witan were guided in everything by the will of the King. But when the King had no will, or a will which the Witan could not consent to, then the machine gave way, and nothing was to be seen |Importance of the King as the Executive.| but confusion and every evil work. Again, the King was not only the first mover, he was also the main doer of everything. The Witan decreed, but it was the King who carried out their decrees. Weighty as was the influence of his personal character on the nature of the resolutions to be passed, its influence was weightier still on the way in which those resolutions were to be carried out. Under a good King counsel and execution went hand in hand; under a weak or wicked King there was no place found for either. Sometimes disgraceful resolutions were passed; sometimes wise and good resolutions were never carried into effect. The Witan under Æthelred sometimes voted money to buy off the Danes, sometimes they voted armies to fight against them; but, with Æthelred to carry out their votes, it mattered little what their |Influence of the King as Hlaford of all the chief men.| votes were. Add to all this the boundless influence which attached to the King from his having all the chief men of the land bound to him by the personal tie of thegnship. He was the Cyne-hlaford, at once the King of the nation and the personal lord of each individual. Though his grants of folkland and his nominations to the highest offices needed the assent of the Witan, yet in these matters above all his initiative would be undoubted; the Witan had only to confirm, and they would seldom be tempted to reject, the proposals which the King laid before them. He was not less the fountain of honour and the fountain of wealth, because in the disposal of both he had certain decent ceremonies to go through. |General importance and influence of the King.| Add to all this that in unsettled times there is a special chance, both of acts of actual oppression which the law is not strong enough to redress, and of acts of energy beyond the law which the nation easily forgives in the case of a victorious and beloved prince. Altogether, narrowly limited as were the legal powers of an ancient English King, his will, or lack of will, had the main influence on the destinies of the nation, and his personal character was of as much moment to the welfare of the state as the personal character of an absolute ruler.