And I by the half
Of my lord,
By such a loved man
To lie am thinking.”
This institution of military companionship seems to have struck Tacitus with some amazement. He says that this kind of personal relation was among the Germans not thought shameful. This was the natural feeling of a Roman. The duty of a Roman citizen was wholly towards the state. The state might be represented either by a responsible magistrate or by an irresponsible Emperor; in either case obedience was due to the representative of the state; but there was no personal relation to the man. The old Roman institution of patron and client, which was so like the German comitatus, had pretty well died out by the time of Tacitus, and it had at no time been entered into by men of high rank[(53)]. What amazed Tacitus was that among the Germans the noblest in birth and exploits were not looked on as dishonoured by entering the service of a personal lord. To Tacitus himself Trajan was the chief magistrate of the Roman commonwealth, the chief commander of the Roman army; he was a personal master to none but his slaves and freedmen[(54)]. It was only in a much later stage of the Roman Empire that personal service in the court and household of the Emperor began to be looked on as honourable[(55)]. But among the Teutonic nations the personal relation coloured everything; personal service towards a King or other chief was honourable from the beginning; the proudest nobles of Europe have down to this day thought themselves honoured by filling offices about the persons of Emperors, Kings, and other princes which Tacitus would have deemed beneath the dignity of any Roman citizen. We are now accustomed to see this kind of service paid in the case of royal personages only; a few centuries back men of any rank deemed themselves honoured by paying the like service to men of the rank next above their own, or even to men of their own rank who had the start of them in age and reputation. The knight was served by his esquire and the master by his scholar; and the same principle, laid aside everywhere else, lingers on in what is undoubtedly a trace of the Teutonic comitatus, the fagging of our public schools. Now the political effect of the existence of the principle of personal service, the institution of the comitatus, alongside of the primitive political community, was most important in our early history. The personal relation went far to swallow up the purely political one. To enter the service of a chief became so established a practice that at last it was deemed that it was the part of every man to “seek a lord,” as the phrase was, to commend himself, to put himself under the protection of some man more powerful than himself[(56)]. The man owed faithful service to his lord; the lord owed faithful protection to his man. The very word Lord, in its older and fuller form Hlaford, implies the rewards which the lord bestowed on his faithful man. The word is in some sort a puzzling one; but there can be no doubt that it is connected with hlaf, loaf, and that its general meaning is the giver of bread[(57)]. Now herein lurks something which has greatly affected all later political and social arrangements. The institution of the comitatus in its first state had nothing whatever to do with the holding of land. But the man looked for reward of his faithful service at the hands of his lord; he looked for the bread of which his lord’s title proclaimed him as the giver. There was of course no form of reward, no form of bread, so convenient or so honourable as that of a grant of land to be held as the reward of past and the condition of future service. Moreover the custom of granting out lands to be held by the tenure of military service had become common in the later days of Roman power[(58)]. Such lands were of course held, not of the Emperor as a personal lord, but of the Roman Commonwealth of which he was the head and representative. But the custom of holding lands by military service fell in well with the Teutonic institution of personal service, and the union of the two in the same person produced that feudal relation which has had such an important bearing on all political and social life through the whole of the middle ages and down to our own time. The land granted by the lord to his man, or the land which the man agreed to hold as if it had been so granted, might be a kingdom held of the Emperor or the Pope, or it might be the smallest estate held of a more powerful neighbour. In either case, such a holding by military service was a fief, and from the institution of such fiefs the so-called Feudal System, with all its manifold workings for good and for evil, had its rise. But so far as the Feudal System existed, either in England or in any other country, it existed wholly as a system which had grown up by the side of an earlier system which it wholly or partially displaced. The feudal tenant, holding his land of a lord by military service gradually supplanted, wholly or partially, in most countries of Europe, the allodial holder who held his land of no other man, and who knew no superior but God and the Law[(59)]. In England this change took place only gradually and partially; it was through the Norman Conquest, or, more accurately, through the subtle legal theories which came in with the Norman Conquest, that it was finally established. And, after all, it was rather in theory than in fact that it was established. The Feudal System, as something spreading into every corner of the land, and affecting every relation of life, never obtained the same complete establishment in England which it did in some continental countries.
But it is only indirectly that my subject has anything to do with the Feudal System, and especially with its social working. I have to do with the comitatus, out of which the feudal relation grew, mainly in another aspect equally indirect, namely, the way in which it affected our earliest political institutions. It gave us a new form of nobility, a nobility of office and of personal relation to the King, instead of a nobility founded on birth only. It gave us a nobility of Thegns, which gradually supplanted the earlier nobility of the Eorls. As the royal power and dignity grew, it came to be looked on as the highest honour to enter into the personal service of the King. Two results followed; service towards the King, a place, that is, in the King’s comitatus, became the badge and standard of nobility[(60)]. And it greatly strengthened the power of the King that he stood to all the chief men of his kingdom in the relation, not only of a political ruler, but of a personal lord, a lord to whose service they were bound by a personal tie, and of whom they held their lands as the gift of his personal bounty. It marks perhaps a decline from the first idea of the comitatus that the old word Gesith, companion, answering exactly to the Latin Comes used by Tacitus, was supplanted by the name Thegn, literally servant[(61)]. But when personal service was deemed honourable, the name of servant was no degradation, and the name Thegn became equivalent to the older Eorl. The King’s Thegn, the men who held their land of the King and who were bound to him by the tie of personal service, formed the highest class of nobility. The Thegns of inferior lords, of Bishops and Ealdormen, formed a secondary class. A nobility of this kind, there can be no doubt, was so far more liberal than the elder nobility of birth that admission to it was not forbidden to men of lower degree. The Ceorl, the ordinary freeman, could not in strictness become an Eorl, for the simple reason that he could not change his forefathers; but he might, and he often did, become a Thegn[(62)]. But, on the other hand, such a nobility, while it made it easier for the common freeman to rise, tended to lower the condition of the common freemen who did not rise. For the very reason that the barrier of birth is one which cannot be passed, it is in some respects less irksome than the barrier of wealth or office. The privileges of a strictly hereditary nobility are much more likely to sink into mere honorary distinctions than the privileges of a nobility whose rank is backed by the solid advantages of office and of a personal relation to the sovereign.
The tendency then of the first six hundred years after the settlement of the English in Britain was to increase the power of the Crown, to depress the lower class of freemen, to exchange a nobility of birth for a nobility of personal service to the King. That is to say, England had, before the Norman Conquest, already begun to walk, though with less speed than most other nations, in the path which led to the general overthrow of liberty throughout Europe. The foreign invasion which for a moment seemed to have crushed her freedom for ever did in truth only lead to its new birth, to its fresh establishment in forms better fitted to the altered state of things, forms better fitted to be handed on to later times, forms better fitted to preserve the well-being of a great nation, than those forms of the old Teutonic community which still linger on in those remote corners of the world which I spoke of at my beginning. That momentary overthrow, that lasting new birth, will be the subject of my second chapter. I will now only call you to bear in mind that England has never been left at any time without a National Assembly of some kind or other. Be it Witenagemót, Great Council, or Parliament, there has always been some body of men claiming, with more or less of right, to speak in the name of the nation. And bear too in mind that, down to the Norman Conquest, the body which claimed to speak in the name of the nation was, in legal theory at least, the nation itself. This is a point on which I mean again to speak more fully; I would now simply suggest the thought, new perhaps to many, that there was a time when every freeman of England, no less than every freeman of Uri, could claim a direct voice in the councils of his country. There was a time when every freeman of England could raise his voice or clash his weapon in the Assembly which chose Bishops and Ealdormen and Kings, when he could boast that the laws which he obeyed were laws of his own making, and that the men who bore rule over him were rulers of his own choosing. Those days are gone, nor need we seek to call them back. The struggles of ages on the field and in the Senate have again won back for us the selfsame rights in forms better suited to our times than the barbaric freedom of our fathers. Yet it is well that we should look back to the source whence comes all that we boast of as our own possession, all that we have handed on to our daughter commonwealths in other continents. Let us praise famous men and our fathers that begat us. Let us look to the rock whence we were hewn and to the hole of the pit whence we were digged. Freedom, the old poet says, is a noble thing[(63)]; it is also an ancient thing. And those who love it now in its more modern garb need never shrink from tracing back its earlier forms to the first days when history has aught to tell us of the oldest life of our fathers and our brethren.