After this follow descriptions of the duties of the bee-keeper, the pork-butcher, the swine-herd, the sower, the shepherd, the wood-ward and many other agricultural labourers; the whole forming a most interesting picture of a large and well-managed English estate in the eleventh century.
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In studying the laws of Alfred’s successors throughout the tenth century, we are struck by the evident desire of the royal legislators to draw tighter the reins of government and to combat the tendencies towards disintegration and anarchy which they found in the body politic. Under Edward the Elder the great pact between Alfred and Guthrum was the corner-stone of the social fabric and to deal out equal justice between Englishman and Dane was the chief aim of a righteous ruler, but, unfortunately, the king found that he had much cause to complain of timid, corrupt and inefficient servants. The offence of oferhyrnesse, contempt of the royal word and commandment, is one which is now first mentioned, and of which we often hear afterwards from Edward and his descendants. Of this offence, punishable by a fine of 120 shillings, any gerefa (“reeve” or magistrate) was guilty who failed to administer justice according to the testimony of the sworn witnesses, or to hold his gemot once in every four weeks for the administration of justice. Oferhyrnesse was also the offence of any person who presumed “to cheapen except in a port,” that is, to conduct any process of bargain and sale except within the limits of a market town and in the presence of a port reeve, to whose testimony he could afterwards appeal to prove that he was not dealing in stolen goods.
Strong and vigorous ruler as Athelstan was, he needed to put forth all his powers in order to repress the growing tendency to anarchy and injustice. “If any of my gerefan,” says he, “disobey this edict or be more slack concerning this matter than I have ordained, he shall pay the penalty of his oferhyrnesse, and I will find some one else who will attend to what I say.... I have learned that our peace is worse held than I like, and my witan say that I have borne it too long. I have therefore ordered that all such peace-breakers shall get out of my kingdom with wives and children, and all that they have, and shall go whither I direct. If they return to this realm they shall be treated like thieves caught in the act.” King Athelstan’s influence, however, was not always exerted on the side of increased severity. The citizens of London record that he conveyed to the archbishop his opinion, that it was a lamentable thing that so young a man as one between the ages of twelve and fifteen should be put to death for any offence, or any man for stealing a chattel of less value than twelve pennies, and that he altered the law accordingly, raising the limit of age and of value in both cases.
In order to make the punishment of crime, especially of the one most common crime, cattle-stealing, more certain, it was ordered by Edward the Elder[232] that every man should have his geteama, a person doubtless of known character and position, who would act as his advocate or guarantor in any transactions of purchase and sale. It was probably a development of the same idea when Edgar ordained as follows: “This then is what I will, that every man shall be under a borh whether he be within boroughs or without them and that witnesses be appointed in every borough and in every hundred”.[233] The law was repeated and strengthened by Canute who thus announced his decision: “And we will that every free man if he be over the age of twelve years shall be included in a hundred and a tithing, that he may have right to clear himself from accusation and right to receive wer if any one assail him. Otherwise he shall have none of the rights of a free man be he householder (heorth-faeste) or follower. Let every one then be brought into the hundred and have a borh, and let the borh hold him and bring him at all times to judgment. Many a powerful man wishes by hook or crook to protect his man and thinks that he can easily do it, whether he be free or theow. But we will not tolerate this injustice.”[234]
Of this institution of the tithing, whereby the poorer class of free men were grouped together in clusters of ten, we heard among the citizens of London in the reign of Athelstan. That grouping was for purposes of mutual protection; this seems rather to be in order to enforce mutual responsibility. It is not to be wondered that organisms, so low down in the social system, have not made much mark in the Anglo-Saxon law-book; but it seems to be generally agreed that from them was derived that institution of frank-pledge which, under the Norman kings, was so efficient a machine for the repression of disorder.
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In the laws of the later Anglo-Saxon kings we seem to hear less about oath-helping and much more about ordeals than we heard in the laws of their predecessors. Does this change betoken the growth of superstition or a decay of honesty and public spirit and a diminished confidence in the veracity of the oath-helpers? The chief modes of ordeal among the Anglo-Saxons were three, and an accused person seems to have had his right of choosing between them. In all there was a direct appeal to the Almighty to show by the ordeal the innocence or guilt of the accused; and the Church by solemn services, prayers and fastings gave her sanction to the appeal. (1) If the ordeal was by cold water, the accused person was hurled into a vessel of water, after a prayer had been uttered that “the creature, water” might reject this person if he were guilty or receive him if innocent, according to the course of nature, into her bosom. In this ordeal to float was fatal, to sink was salvation. (2) In the ordeal of fire the accused must carry a mass of red-hot iron weighing one pound a distance of nine feet, or must plunge his hand up to the wrist into a vessel of boiling water to pick out of it a stone. After either of these trials the hand was bandaged and sealed up. If, after the lapse of three days, when the bandages were removed, there was raw flesh visible, the man was guilty, if the hand showed clean skin he was innocent. If the crime laid to his charge were that of conspiring against the king’s life, then the ordeal must be of threefold severity; the mass of hot iron must weigh three pounds, or the arm of the accused must be plunged in up to the elbow. (3) The ordeal of the test-morsel (corsnaed) was chiefly practised upon ecclesiastics and consisted in the obligation to swallow a piece of bread or cheese upon which a solemn anathema had been pronounced for any but an innocent partaker. As Ethelred said in one of his laws:[235] “If an accusation is laid against a servant of the altar who has no friends and who cannot call upon any oath-helper, let him go to the corsnaed and there fare as God shall will”.
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The judicial processes even in the ordinary courts of the realm certainly seem to us sufficiently blundering and barbarous; but at the end of the period which we are now considering, other courts of private jurisdiction were coming into being, and whether they administered better or worse justice who shall say? In the reign of Canute we first find a clear case of a grant of sake and soke to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a kind of grant which was given with lavish hand by the king whose reign lies next before us, Edward the Confessor.[236] Without entering upon the question whether the Danish king was really the first to bestow this special privilege upon his courtiers, lay or ecclesiastical, we may safely assert that, at any rate in the eleventh century, our kings were freely attaching judicial functions to the ownership of lands. For this is, undoubtedly, what is meant by these words sake and soke, or sac and soc. The first probably means a “matter” or “cause”;[237] the second, “a seeking out” or “inquiry”. The meaning in any case is clear. The abbot or wealthy thegn who “had sake and soke” had, merely in right of the king’s grant, and generally as appurtenant to the land which the king had given him, the right to try causes of dispute arising in his district. Apparently that right included both what we should call civil and criminal causes; and, of course, the right must have carried with it power to enforce his decisions, and also—no unimportant matter—the right to receive the fines and other profits arising from the administration of justice.