ENGLAND
IN THE YEAR 900.
Effects of the Danish wars.
But meanwhile, when they were but just settled down, and the land was still black with their burnings, England appeared in a sorry state, and Alfred the king had a hard task before him when he set to work to reform and reorganize his wasted realm. Well-nigh every town had been sacked and given to the flames at one time or another, during fifty years of war: the churches lay in ruins, the monasteries were deserted. Riches and learning had fled from the wasted land. "There was not one priest south of Thames," writes King Alfred himself, "who could properly understand the Latin of his own church-books, and very few in the whole of England." Moreover, the social condition of the people was rapidly becoming what we may style "feudalized"; that is, the smaller freeholders all over the country, unable to defend themselves from the Danes, were yielding themselves to be the "men" of their greater neighbours. This phrase implied that they surrendered their complete independence, and consented to pay the great men certain dues, and to follow them to the wars, and seek justice at their hands instead of from the free meeting of the village moot. The land still remained the peasant's own, but, instead of being personally free, he was now a dependent. It is noticeable that a similar state of things grew up from the same cause in every part of Western Europe during the ninth century.
Reforms of Alfred.—The royal power.—The army.
Finding himself confronted with this new condition of affairs, Alfred strengthened the royal power by compelling all these great lords to become his own sworn followers—gesiths, as they would have been called in an earlier age. But now the word was thegn, though the status was much the same. So all the great landholders of England became the king's "men," just as the villagers had become the men of the great landholders. The thegns served the king in bower and hall, and had to follow him in person whenever he took the field, as the old gesiths had followed the leaders of the first Saxon war-bands. They were a numerous body, and constituted a kind of standing army, since it was their duty to serve whenever their master went out to battle. The fyrd, or local militia of the villages, Alfred divided into two parts, one of which was always left at home to till the fields when the other half went out to war. It was at the head of his thegns and this reorganized fyrd that Alfred smote the Danes when they dared to invade his realm in his later years.
The laws.
Alfred has a great name as a law-giver, but he did more in the way of collecting and codifying the laws of the kings who were before him than in issuing new ordinances of his own. But since he made everything clear and orderly, the succeeding generations used to speak of the "laws of Alfred," when they meant the ancient statutes and customs of the realm.
Learning and civilization.