[428]. He was the ǽhteswán or porcarius dominicalis. I cannot explain the distinction intended by ða grǽgan swín, literally the grey swine.
[429]. Perhaps great-grandmother.
[430]. Cod. Dipl. No. 311.
[431]. Ibid. No. 1079.
[432]. Ibid. No. 981.
CHAPTER IX.
THE MUTUAL GUARANTEE. MÆGBURH. TITHING.
HUNDRED.
The organization in Marks and in the Gá or Scír was a territorial one, based upon the natural conformation of the country, common possession of the soil and usufruct of its produce. It has been already said that both of these divisions had their separate courts of justice or parliaments, their judges and executive officers. But some further machinery was required to secure the public peace, to provide for the exercise of what, in modern society, we call the police, and to ensure the rights of the individual markman, in respect to other markmen, as well as his conformity to the general law. A corporate existence was necessary, which should embrace a more detailed system of relations than was to be found either in the Mark or in the Shiremoot. Strictly speaking, the former of these was principally busied with the questions which arose out of its own peculiar nature, that is, with offences against the integrity of the frontier, the forest, the rights of common in the pastures and meadows, and other delinquencies of a public character. On the other hand, the Shiremoot, though it must have taken cognizance of disputed questions between several Marks, and may, even from the first, have exercised some description of appellate jurisdiction, must naturally have considered the higher and more general attributes of legislation and foreign policy, the national rather than municipal administration, as belonging to its peculiar and appropriate province. Perhaps also the exigencies of military discipline may gradually have rendered a more complicated method of enrolment necessary, by means of which companies and regiments might be kept upon a permanent footing, and called into immediate action when occasion demanded their services; while, at the same time, due provision was made for the tilling the lands of those whose personal exertions were required in defence of the public weal[[433]].
There were two forms in which these various objects might be attained; these were, subordinate organizations of men, not excessive in number, or too widely dispersed, and founded either upon the bond of blood or the ties of family, including that of adoption, or merely upon an arbitrary numerical definition. Each of these plans had advantages as well as defects: the family bond alone did not secure a sufficient territorial unity, although in practice it had at first considerable influence upon the location of individual households; moreover it gave rise to an inequality continually on the increase, and necessarily threatening to the independence of the free men. On the other hand, any merely arbitrary, numerical classification would have excluded a most important social element, the responsibility of man to man in the bond of kindred, the feelings and engagements of family affection, family honour and family ambition. The problem was finally solved by a partial union of the two methods: in all probability, the law of compromise which reigns throughout all history, gradually brought about a fusion of two separate principles, widely differing in point of antiquity, and thus superinduced the artificial upon the natural bond, without entirely destroying the influence of the latter.
For I think it unquestionable that the artificial bond was really later in point of time: since, in the first place, indefinite and vague arrangements usually precede the definite and settled; and next, because Tacitus takes no notice whatever of any but the family bond, which he represents as stringent in the highest degree. We have already seen that Caesar declares the divisions of the land to have taken place according to families or relationships, cognationes[[434]], from which we may infer at first a considerable amount of territorial unity. From his far more observant successor we learn that the military organization was based upon the same principle; that the composition of the troop or regiment depended upon no accidental arrangement, but was founded upon families or relationships[[435]]; and that every man was bound to take up the enmities as well as the friendships of his father or kinsman[[436]]. But leaving these earlier evidences, it still seems that the Mǽgburh or Family-bond is an institution whose full comprehension is necessary to a clear conception of the Anglosaxon public and private life.
The idea of the family is at once the earliest and strongest of human ties; in its development it is also the most ennobling to the individual and salutary to the state; on it depend the honour and dignity of woman, the unselfish education of man, the training of children to obedience and love, of parents to protection and justice, of all to love of country and enlightened subordination to the state. Where it does not exist, man becomes an instrument in the hands of others, or the blind tool of systems. In its highest form it is the representative of that great mystery by which all Christians are one brotherhood, united under one Father and King. Throughout the latter day of ethnic civilization, when the idea of state had almost ceased to have power, and the idea of family did not exist, there was a complete destruction both of public and private morality; and the world, grown to be a sink of filth and vice, was tottering to the fall which Providence in mercy had decreed for its purification. The irruption of the German tribes breathed into the dead bones of heathen cultivation the breath of a new life; and the individual dignity of man as a member of a family,—the deep-seated feeling of all those nations,—while it prepared them to become the founders of Christian states which should endure, made them the wonder of the philosophers and theologians of Rome, Greece and Africa, and an example to be held up to the degenerate races whom they had subdued[[437]]. The German house was a holy thing; the bond of marriage a sacred and symbolic engagement[[438]]; holy above man was woman herself. Even in the depths of their forests the stern warriors had assigned to her a station which nothing but that deep feeling could have rendered possible: this was the sacred sex, believed to be in nearer communion with divinity than men[[439]]. In the superstitious tradition of their mythology, it was the young and beautiful Shieldmays, the maiden Wælcyrian, who selected the champions that had deserved to become the guests of Wóden. The matrons presided over the rites of religion, conducted divinations[[440]], and encouraged the warriors on the field of battle[[441]]; Veledas and Aurinias, prophetesses in the bloom of youth and beauty, led the raw levies of the North to triumph over the veteran legions of Rome. Neither rank nor wealth could atone for violated chastity[[442]]; nor were in general any injuries more severely punished than those which the main strength of man enabled him to inflict on woman[[443]]. That woman, nevertheless, in the family, held a subordinate situation to men, lies in the nature of the family itself, and in the disposition and qualities which have been implanted in woman, to enable her to fulfil her appointed duties in the scheme of Providence; qualities not different in degree, but kind, from those of her helpmate, that they may be the complement of his, and, united with his, make up the full and perfect circle of humanity. As an individual, woman was considered a being of a higher nature; as a member of the state, she was necessarily represented by him upon whom nature had imposed the joyful burthen of her support, and the happy duty of her protection,—a principle too little considered by those who, with a scarcely pardonable sciolism, have clamoured for what they call the rights of woman. Woman among the Teutons was near akin to divinity, but not one among them ever raved that the femme libre could be woman.