Still even those who fled for refuge to the land, could find little opportunity of improving their situation: there was no room for them in an island which was thenceforward to be organized upon the Teutonic principles of association. The Saxons were an agricultural and pastoral people: they required land for their alods,—forests, marshes and commons for their cattle: they were not only dangerous rivals for the possession of those estates which, lying near the cities, were probably in the highest state of cultivation, but they had cut off all communication by extending themselves over the tracts which lay between city and city. But they required serfs also, and these might now be obtained in the greatest abundance and with the greatest security, cooped up within walls, and caught as it were in traps, where the only alternative was slavery or starvation[[788]]. Nor can we reasonably imagine that such spoils as could yet be wrested from the degenerate inhabitants were despised by conquerors whose principle it was that wealth was to be won at the spear’s point[[789]].
No doubt the final triumph of the Saxons was not obtained entirely without a struggle: here and there attempts at resistance were made, but never with such success as to place any considerable obstacle in the way of the invaders. Spirit-broken, and reduced both in number and condition, the islanders gradually yielded to the tempest; and with some allowance for the rhetorical exaggeration of the historian, Britain did present a picture such as Beda and Gildas have left. Stronghold after stronghold fell, less no doubt by storm (which the Saxons were in general not prepared to effect) than by blockade, or in consequence of victories in the open field. The sack of Anderida by Aelli, and the extermination of its inhabitants, is the only recorded instance of a fortified city falling by violent breach, and in this case so complete was the destruction that the ingenuity of modern enquirers has been severely taxed to assign the ancient site. But when we are told[[790]] that Cúðwulf, by defeating the Britons in 571 at Bedford, gained possession of Leighton Buzzard, Aylesbury, Bensington and Ensham, I understand it only of a wide tract of land in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, which had previously been dependent upon towns in those several districts[[791]], and which perished in consequence. Again when we are told[[792]] that six years later Cúðwine took Bath, and Cirencester and Gloucester, the statement seems to me only to imply that he cleared the land from the confines of Oxfordshire to the Severn and southward to the Avon, and so rendered it safely habitable by his Teutonic comrades and allies. Thirty years later we find Northumbria stretching westward till the fall of Cair Legion became necessary: accordingly Æðelfrið took possession of Chester. Its present condition is evidence enough that he did not level it with the ground, or in any great degree injure its fortifications[fortifications].
The fact has been already noticed that the Saxons did not themselves adopt the Roman cities, and the reason for the course they pursued has been given. They did not want them, and would have been greatly at a loss to know what to do with them. The inhabitants they enslaved, or expelled as a mere necessary precaution and preliminary to their own peaceable occupation of the land: but they neither took possession of the towns, nor did they give themselves the trouble to destroy them[[793]]. They had not the motive, the means or perhaps the patience to unbuild what we know to have been so solidly constructed. Where it suited their purpose to save the old Roman work, they used it for their own advantage: where it did not suit their views of convenience or policy to establish themselves on or near the old sites, they quietly left them to decay. There is not even a probability that they in general took the trouble to dismantle walls or houses to assist in the construction of their own rude dwellings[[794]]. Boards and rafters, much more easily accessible, and to them much more serviceable, much more easy of transport than stones and bond-tiles, they very likely removed: the storms, the dews, the sunshine, the unperceived and gentle action of the elements did the rest,—for desolation marches with giant strides, and neglect is a more potent leveller than military engines. Clogged watercourses undermined the strong foundations; decomposed stucco or the detritus of stone and brick mingled in the deserted chambers with drifted silt, and dust and leaves; accumulations of soil formed in and around the crumbling abodes of wealth and power; winged seeds, borne on the autumnal winds, sunk gently on a new and vigorous bed; vegetation yearly thickening, yearly dying, prepared the genial deposit; roots yearly matting deepened the crust; the very sites of cities vanished from the memory as they had vanished from the eye; till at length the plough went and the corn waved, as it now waves, over the remains of palaces and temples in which the once proud masters of the world had revelled and had worshipped. Who shall say in how many unsuspected quarters yet, the peasant whistles careless and unchidden above the pomp and luxury of imperial Rome!
Many circumstances combined to make a distinction between the cities of Britain and those of the Gallic continent. The latter had always been in nearer relation than our own to Rome: they had been at all periods permitted to enjoy a much greater measure of municipal freedom, and were enriched by a more extensive commercial intercourse. England had no city to boast of so free as Lugdunum, none so wealthy as Massilia. Even in the time of the Gallic independence they had been far more advanced in cultivation than the cities of the Britons, and in later days their organization was maintained by the residence of Roman bishops and a wealthy body of clergy. Nor on the other hand do the Franks appear to have been very numerous in proportion to the land, a sufficient amount of which they could appropriate without very seriously confining the urban populations: many of these still retained their communications with the sea: and, lastly, before the conquerors, slowly advancing from Belgium through Flanders, had spread themselves throughout the populous and wealthy parts of Gaul, their chiefs had shown a readiness to listen to the exhortation of Christian teachers, to enter into the communion of the Church, and recognize its rights and laudable customs. So that in general, whether among the Lombards in Italy, the Goths in Aquitaine, or the Franks in Neustria, there was but little reason for a violent subversion, or even gradual ruin, of the ancient cities. In these the old subsisting elements of civilization were still tolerated, and continued to prevail by the force of uninterrupted usage. More happy than the demoralized and dispossessed inhabitants of Britain, the Roman provincials under the Frankish and Langobardic rule were still numerous and important enough to retain their own laws, and the most of their own customs. Skilful in the character of counsellors or administrators, wealthy and enterprising as merchant-adventurers, dignified and influential as forming almost exclusively the class of the clergy, they still retained their old seats, under the protection of the conquerors: and thus, for the most part their cities survived the conquest, and continued under their ancient character, till they slowly gave way at length in the numerous civil or baronial wars of the middle ages, and the frequent insurrections of the urban populations in their struggle for communal liberties.
It is natural to imagine that when once the Saxons broke up from their peaceful settlements and commenced a career of aggression, they would direct their marches by the great lines of roads which the Roman or British authorities had maintained in every part of the island. They would thus unavoidably be brought into the neighbourhood of earlier towns, and be compelled to decide the question whether they would attack and occupy them, or whether they would turn them and proceed on their march. If the views already expressed in this chapter be correct, it is plain that no very efficient resistance was to be feared by the invaders: they could afford to neglect what in the hands of a population not degraded by the grossest misgovernment would have offered an insuperable obstacle. But the locality of a town is rarely the result of accident alone: there are generally some conveniences of position, some circumstances affecting the security, the comfort or the interests of a people, that determine the sites of their seats: and these which must have been nearly the same for each successive race, may have determined the Saxons to remain where they had determined the Britons or Romans first to settle. Yet even in this case, and admitting Saxon towns to have gradually grown up in the neighbourhood of ancient sites, there is no reason to suppose that either the kings or bishops made their ordinary residences in them; and thus in England, a very active element was wanting to the growth and importance of the towns, which we find in full force in other Roman provinces. In truth both king and bishop adopted for the most part the old Teutonic habit of wandering from vill to vill, from manor to manor, and in this country the positions of cathedrals were as little confined to principal cities as were the positions of palaces. This is not entirely without strangeness, especially in the case of the earliest bishops, seeing that we might reasonably expect Roman missionaries to choose by preference buildings ready for their purpose, and of a nature to which they had been accustomed in Italy. Gregory had himself recommended that the heathen temples should if possible be hallowed to Christian uses; and even if Christian temples were entirely wanting, which we can scarcely imagine to have been the case[[795]], there were yet basilicas in Britain, even as there had been in Rome, which might be made to serve the purposes of churches. Nevertheless, whatever we do read teaches us that in general, on the conversion of a people, structures of the rudest character were erected even upon the sites of ancient civilization: thus in York, Eádwine caused a church of wood to be built in haste, “citato opere,” for the ceremony of his own baptism: thus too in London, upon the establishment of the see, a new church was built—surely a proof that Saxon London and Roman London could not be the same place. It is indeed probable that the missionaries, yet somewhat uncertain of success, and not secure of the popular good-will, desired to fix their residences near those of the kings, for the sake both of protection and of influence; and thus, as the kings did not make their settled residence in cities whether of Saxon or Roman construction, the sees also were not established therein[[796]].
The town of the Saxons had however a totally independent origin, and one susceptible of an easy explanation. The fortress required by a simple agricultural people is not a massive pile with towers and curtains, devised to resist the attacks of reckless soldiers, the assault of battering-trains, the sap of skilful engineers, or the slow reduction of famine. A gentle hill crowned with a slight earthwork, or even a stout hedge, and capacious enough to receive all who require protection, suffices to repress the sudden incursions of marauding enemies, unfurnished with materials for a siege or provisions to carry on a blockade[[797]]. Here and there such may have been found within the villages or on the border of the Mark, tenanted perhaps by an earl or noble with his comites, and thus uniting the characters of the mansion and the fortress: around such a dwelling were congregated the numerous poor and unfree settlers, who obtained a scanty and precarious living on the chieftain’s land; as well as the idlers whom his luxury, his ambition or his ostentation attracted to his vicinity. Here too may have been found the rude manufacturers whose craft supplied the wants of the castellan and his comrades; who may gradually and by slow experience have discovered that the outlying owners also could sometimes offer a market for their productions; and who, as matter of favour, could obtain permission from the lord to exercise their skill on behalf of his neighbours. Similarly round the church or the cathedral must bodies of men have gathered, glad to claim its protection, share its charities and aid in ministering to its wants[[798]]. I hold it undeniable that these people could not feed themselves, and equally so that food would find its way to them; that the neighbouring farmer,—instead of confining his cultivation to the mere amount necessary for the support of his household or the discharge of the royal dues,—would on their account produce and accumulate a capital, through which he could obtain from them articles of convenience and enjoyment which he had neither the leisure nor the skill to make. In this way we may trace the growth of barter, and that most important habit of resorting to fixed spots for commercial and social purposes. In this process the lord had himself a direct and paramount interest. If he took upon himself to maintain freedom of buying and selling, to guarantee peace and security to the chapmen, going and coming, he could claim in return a slight recognition of his services in the shape of toll or custom. If the intervention of his officers supplied an easy mode of attesting the bona fides of a transaction, the parties to it would have been unreasonable had they resisted the jurisdiction which thus gradually grew up. So that on all accounts we may be assured that the lord encouraged as much as possible the resort of strangers to his domain. In the growing prosperity of his dependents, his own condition was immediately and extensively concerned. Even their number was of importance to his revenue, for a capitation-tax, however light, was the inevitable condition of their reception. Their industry as manufacturers or merchants attracted traffic to his channels. Lastly in a military, political and social view, the wealth, the density and the cultivation of his burgher-population were the most active elements of his own power, consideration and influence. What but these rendered the Counts of Flanders so powerful as they were throughout the middle ages? Let it now be only considered with what rapidity all these several circumstances must tend to combine and to develop themselves, as the class of free landowners diminishes in extent and influence and that of the lords increases. Concurrent with such a change must necessarily be the extension of mutual dependence, which is only another name for traffic, and, as far as this alone is concerned, a great advance in the material well-being of society. It is difficult to conceive a more hopeless state than one in which every household should exactly suffice to its own wants, and have no wants but such as itself could supply. Fortunately for human progress, it is one which all experience proves to be impossible. There is no principle of social ethics more certain than this, that in proportion as you secure to a man the command of the necessaries of life, you awaken in him the desire for those things which adorn and refine it. And all experience also teaches that the attempt of any individual to provide both classes of things for himself and within the limits of his own household, will totally fail; that time is wanting to produce any one thing in perfection; that skill can only be attained by exclusive attention to one object; and that a division of labour is indispensable if society is to be enabled to secure, at the least possible sacrifice, the greatest possible amount of comforts and conveniences. The farmer therefore raises, stores and sells the abundance of the grain which he well knows how to gain from his fields; and, relinquishing the vain attempt to make clothes or hardware, ornamental furniture and articles of household utility or elegance, nay even ploughs and harrows,—the instruments of his industry,—purchases them with his superfluity. And so in turn with his superfluity does the mechanic provide himself with bread which he lacks the land, the tools and the skill to raise. But the cultivator and the herdsman require land and space: the mechanic is most advantageously situated where numbers concentrate, where his various materials can be brought together cheaply and speedily; where there is intercourse to sharpen the mind; where there is population to assist in processes which transcend the skill or strength of the individual man. The wealth of the cultivator, that is, his superabundant bread, awakens the mechanic into existence; and the existence of the mechanic, speedily leading to the enterprise of the manufacturer, and the venture of the distributor, broker, merchant, or shopman, ultimately completes the growth of the town. It is unavoidable that the first mechanics—beyond the heroical weapon-smith on the one hand, and on the other the poor professors of such rude arts as the homestead cannot do without,—the wife that spins, the husbandman that hammers his own share and coulter—should be those who have no land; that is, in the state of society which we are now considering,—the unfree. It is a mere accident that they should gather round this lord or that, on his extensive possessions, or that they should seek shelter, food and protection in the neighbourhood of the castle or the cathedral: but where they do settle, in process of time the town must come.
The conditions under which this shall constitute itself are many and various. For a long while they will greatly depend upon the original circumstances which accompanied and regulated the settlement. When a great manufacturing and commercial system has been founded, embracing states and not petty localities only, it is clear that petty local interests will cease to be the guiding principles: but this state of things transcends the limits of a rude and early society. The liberties of the first cities must often have been mere favours on the part of the lords who owned the soil, and protected the dwellers upon it. Later these liberties were the result of bargains between separate powers, grown capable of measuring one another. Lastly, they are necessities imposed by an advanced condition of human associations, in which the wishes, objects and desires of the individual man are hurried resistlessly away by a great movement of civilization, in which the vast attraction of the mass neutralizes and defeats all minor forces. It would indeed be but slight philosophy to suppose that any one set of circumstances could account for the infinite variety which the history of towns presents: though there are features of resemblance common to them all, yet each has its peculiar story, its peculiar conditions of progress and decay; even as the children of one family, which bear a near likeness to each other, yet each has its own tale of joy and sorrow, of smiles and tears, of triumph and failure. Yet there is probably no single element of urban prosperity more potent than situation, or which more pervasively modifies all other and concurrent conditions of success. Let the most careless observer only compare London, Liverpool and Bristol, I will not say with Munich or Madrid, but even with Warwick, Stafford or Winchester. If royal favour and court gaieties could have made cities great, the latter should have flourished; for they were the residences of the rulers of Mercia and Wessex, the scenes of witena gemóts, of Christmas festivals and Easters when the king solemnly wore his crown; while the ceorls or mangeras of Brigstow and Lundenwíc were only cheapening hides with the Esterlings, warehousing the foreign wines which were to supply the royal table, or bargaining with the adventurer from the East for the incense which was to accompany the high mass in the Cathedral. But Commerce, the child of opportunity, brought wealth; wealth, power; and power led independence in its train.
Against the manifold relations which arose during the gradual development of urban populations, the original position of the lord could not be maintained intact. It is indeed improbable that in any very great number of cases, the inhabitants of an English town long continued in the condition of personal serfage. The lords were too weak, the people too strong, for a system like that of the French nobles and their towns ever to have become settled here; nor had our city populations, like the Gallic provincials, the habit and use of slavery. The first settlers on a noble’s land may have been unfree; serfs and oppressed labourers from other estates may have been glad to take refuge among them from taskmasters more than ordinarily severe; but in this unmixed state they did not long remain. There is no doubt that freemen gradually united with them under the lord’s protection or in his alliance; that strangers sojourned among them in hope of profits from traffic; and hence that a race gradually grew up, in whom the original feelings of the several classes survived in a greatly modified form. To this, though generally so difficult to trace step by step in history, we owe the difference of the urban government in different cities,—distinctions in detail more frequent than is commonly supposed, and which can be unhesitatingly referred to the earliest period of urban existence, if not in fact, at least in principle,—institutions representing in a shadowy manner the distant conditions under which they arose, and for the most part separated in the sharpest contrast from the ordinary forms prevalent upon the land.
The general outline of an urban constitution, in the earlier days of the Saxons, may have been somewhat of the following character. The freemen, either with or without the co-operation of the lord, but usually with it, formed themselves into associations or clubs, called gylds. These must not be confounded either on the one side with the Hanses (in Anglosaxon Hósa), i. e. trading guilds, or on the other with the guilds of crafts (“collegia opificum”) of later ages. Looking to the analogy of the country-gylds or Tithings, described in detail in the ninth chapter of the First Book, we may believe that the whole free town population was distributed into such associations; but that in each town, taken altogether, they formed a compact and substantive body called in general the Burhwaru, and perhaps sometimes more especially the Ingang burhware, or “burgher’s club[[799]].” It is also certain from various expressions in the boundaries of charters, as “Burhware mǽd,” “burhware mearc,” and the like, that they were in possession of real property as a corporate body, whether they had any provision for the management of corporation revenues, we cannot tell; but we may unhesitatingly affirm that the gylds had each its common purse, maintained at least in part by private contributions, or what we may more familiarly[familiarly] term rates levied under their bye-laws. These gylds, whether in their original nature religious, political, or merely social unions, rested upon another and solemn principle: they were sworn brotherhoods between man and man, established and fortified upon “áð and wed,” oath and pledge; and in them we consequently recognize the germ of those sworn communes, communae or communiae[[800]], which in the times of the densest seigneurial darkness offered a noble resistance to episcopal and baronial tyranny, and formed the nursing-cradles of popular liberty. They were alliances offensive and defensive among the free citizens, and in the strict theory possessed all the royalties, privileges and rights of independent government and internal jurisdiction. How far they could make these valid, depended entirely upon the relative strength of the neighbouring lord, whether he were ealdorman, king or bishop. Where they had full power, they probably placed themselves under a geréfa of their own, duly elected from among the members of their own body, who thenceforth took the name of Portgeréfa or Burhgeréfa, and not only administered justice in the burhwaremót or husting, on behalf of the whole state, but if necessary led the city trainbands to the field. Such a civic political constitution seems the germ of those later liberties which we understand by the expression that a city is a county of itself,—words once more weighty than they now are, when privilege has become less valuable before the face of an equal law. Nevertheless there was once a time when it was no slight advantage for a population to be under a portreeve or sheriff of their own, and not to be exposed to the arbitrary will of a noble or bishop who might claim to exercise the comitial authority within their precincts. Such a free organization was capable of placing a city upon terms of equality with other constituted powers; and hence we can easily understand the position so frequently assumed by the inhabitants of London. As late as the tenth century, and under Æðelstán, a prince who had carried the influence of the crown to an extent unexampled in any of his predecessors, we find the burghers treating as power to power with the king, under their portreeves and bishop: engaging indeed to follow his advice, if he have any to give which shall be for their advantage; but nevertheless constituting their own sworn gyldships or commune, by their own authority, on a basis of mutual alliance and guarantee, as to themselves seemed good[[801]].
The rights of such a corporation were in truth royal. They had their own alliances and feuds; their own jurisdiction, courts of justice and power of execution; their own markets and tolls; their own power of internal taxation; their personal freedom with all its dignity and privileges. And to secure these great blessings they had their own towers and walls and fortified houses, bell and banner, watch and ward, and their own armed militia.