More than eight centuries elapsed between the reign of Alfred the Great, and the "Bill of Rights," in the reign of William and Mary (875 to 1688), In all this time, the English people were steadily and constantly engaged in building and perfecting their present system of government.
It was a fabric of slow and often unconscious growth, and many times when it seemed to be on {125} the verge of completion, the storms of rebellion, of kingly usurpations, of foreign wars, swept fiercely through its walls and blew them to the ground. These very storms were instruments in regular and organic development; and, nothing discouraged or disheartened, the people bravely set to work, and commenced again the task of rebuilding and finishing the great governmental edifice, which they were to leave to the world as an imperishable monument of their courage, hardihood, love of freedom and justice, and which should, in all time, prove a refuge and an asylum for the oppressed and liberty-loving people of the world.
The foundations of this government were not completed in the reign of Alfred—when the different kingdoms which prevailed in England were fast approaching consolidation.
The germs of an executive power are faintly foreshadowed in the personal influence of the reigning King, whose authority vacillated as the King himself was strong or weak. But the war with the Northmen raised Alfred and his sons from tribal leaders to national kings, and the dying out of other royal stocks left the house of Cerdic the one line of hereditary kingship.[10]
The seeds of parliamentary birth were steadily growing in the form of a Witenagemote, in the "great meeting" of the Assembly of the wise—which represented the whole English people, as the wise moots of each kingdom represented the {126} separate peoples of each, its powers being as supreme in the wider field as theirs in the narrower, all developing from the people as they were arranged in their local Assemblies or Hundreds.[11] For to it belonged the higher justice, the power to impose taxes, the making of laws, the conclusion of treaties, the control of wars, the disposal of public lands, the appointment of great officers of state, and, finally, it could elect or depose a king.[12]
It is not within the limits or sphere of my purpose to go into the details, but when Alfred died the fundamental principles of a sound and substantial government existed, illustrated in an executive, legislative, and judicial department clearly defined.
Besides this feature of his reign, a commercial activity began to be developed, and literary tastes and education encouraged and cultivated.
The free institutions of Alfred survived under the Norman tyranny or conquest. No substantial change was made in law or custom by William.[13]
The germs of the famous Magna Charta were laid in the reign of Henry I., and almost one of the first acts of this monarch was to grant a charter which was calculated to remedy many of the grievous oppressions which had been committed during the reigns of his father, William the Conqueror, and his brother, William Rufus.
{127}