A.D. 890. WESSEX. ALFRED.
CAP. 27. "If a man, kinless of paternal relatives, fight and slay a man, and then if he have maternal relatives, let them pay a third of the 'wer'; his guild-brethren a third part; for a third let him flee. If he have no maternal relatives, let his guild-brethren pay half, for half let him flee."
CAP. 28. "If a man kill a man thus circumstanced, if he have no relatives, let half be paid to the king, half to his guild-brethren."
It is very hard for us to understand what that means. One would infer that the weregild was only paid by a man with relatives on his father's side. It doesn't say that, but that is the inference. We shall have plenty to say about the guilds later—the historical predecessors of the modern trades-unions. We here find the word guild recognized and spoken of in the law as early as 890.
A.D. 920. WESSEX. EDWARD.
"2. And if a ceorl throve, so that had fully five hides of his own land, church and kitchen, bell-house and burh-gate-seat, and special duty in the king's hall, then was he thenceforth of thegn-right worthy.
"6. And if a merchant throve, so that he fared thrice over the wide sea by his own means, then was he thenceforth of thegn-right worthy."
Worldly success has thus always been the foundation of English nobility.
Then there is a good deal about how much you have to pay for a churl, and how much for an earl, and so on, leaving out only the slaves; for all the free people of England in Saxon times were divided into earls and churls; that is, noblemen and agricultural laborers or yeomanry; these were the two estates besides the church, always a class by itself. Later there grew up the thanes, who were merely large landlords; the law became that a man that had five hides of land, five or six hundred acres, with a farm, should by the mere fact of having that land become a thane, an earl. That method of ennobling a man by land got to be a way, at that time the only way, by which a churl or a villein could become a nobleman or even be emancipated. Exactly as now with our American Indians; when an Indian gets one hundred and sixty acres given to him in severalty he becomes, under the Dawes Act, a citizen of the United States. Later there grew up emancipation by the guilds. The word guild meant the members of a certain handicraft, but that was rather the secondary meaning; it originally meant the freemen of the town. But the freemen of the towns were made up of the freemen of the guilds. No one could become a member of the guild without going through certain ceremonies, much as he would now to join a trades-union; and no one could become a freeman of the town unless he was a freeman of the guild. The law grew to be, however, that if a man succeeded in staying in a town for a year and a day, without being turned out, plying his handicraft, he became by that mere fact a freeman of the town; for the citizens of towns established their liberty, both personal and political, far earlier than the dwellers on agricultural land.