From a consideration of the laws of Ine and other nearly contemporary sources, we may, perhaps, safely arrive at the following general conclusions as to the nature of the social edifice in the eighth century. At the summit of that edifice we find, of course, the king. He is king as yet of only a few English shires, a monarch of far less importance than the Frankish kings before they sank into inefficiency, yet a much greater man than many who had borne the same title in preceding centuries. In the early history and charters of the Anglo-Saxons we are struck with the large number of persons who bear the title of cyning or rex. Edwin slays five kings when fighting against the Saxons. Four kings were reigning at the same time in Sussex, three in Essex. There were kings of the Hwiccas (Worcestershire and Warwickshire) and a separate kingdom of the Middle Angles and of Lindsey, all of which vanished leaving no trace in the so-called “Heptarchy” of later historians.[107]
All this, though partly accounted for by the tendency to treat the kingdom as a family estate and to divide it up at the king’s death among his surviving sons, shows also that there must have been a strong movement in the opposite direction, a tendency towards unity and consolidation to produce the three comparatively large and powerful kingdoms of Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, which are practically all that are of historic importance in the eighth century.
It may have been partly on account of the increasing majesty of the royal name that the nobility (if we may thus speak of the classes reaching from the throne down to the lowest stratum of thegn-hood) became, what perhaps they had not been originally, a class of ministri and milites, servants to the king in peace and in war. Writers on the early constitution of the Germanic states are accustomed to dwell on the distinction between the primeval “nobility by birth” and its successor, “nobility by service”. Without denying the probability that nobles of the first kind existed among the invaders of England, we must admit that in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as we know them it is the second species, “nobility by service,” in the king’s court with which we find ourselves chiefly brought in contact. When the king takes counsel with his witan it is with the archbishop and bishops, with the ealdormen, the king’s thegns and the “exalted councillors” (gethungenan witan) in their various degrees that he deliberates, with their concurrence that he makes laws for the welfare of the realm, and by their cross-made signatures that his charters granting land are attested. We do not appear to have any accurate information as to the time of meeting of the witan (witenagemot). Nor was the place of meeting by any means always the same even for each Saxon kingdom, though Winchester, Kingston, and in later times London, were frequent homes of the West Saxon witenagemot.
The functions of this great council of the wise men of the realm, the degree to which they shared or controlled the royal power in matters of legislation, of finance, of the defence of the country, are better learned by watching the course of national history than from any attempt to frame a definition of that which was essentially vague, fluctuating and incoherent. The relation between the witenagemot and the medieval parliaments of the Plantagenets must be felt to be only one of rather faint analogy. In some respects the contemporary ecclesiastical councils of Visigothic Spain, at any rate in their later phases, present a much closer correspondence of type. It certainly seems, from the language of the Chronicle, that the English witan, like those councils, had a powerful voice in the election of the king, though, unlike the Spanish councillors, the Wise Men of Wessex were, in their choice, for the greater part of the time confined to one royal line, the men “whose descent goeth unto Cerdic”.[108]
NOTE ON ANGLO-SAXON MONEY.
To understand properly the information about wergilds supplied to us by the Anglo-Saxon laws, we must devote a little attention to the Anglo-Saxon currency. Our ancestors a thousand years ago used for the most part the same pecuniary language that we use to-day. They generally spoke of pounds, shillings and pence; and the clerkly ecclesiastics who had to translate these words into Latin employed the Libra, Solidus and Denarius, which have given us the well-known symbols £ s. d. This translation, however, into the terms of Roman currency has done nothing but confuse our own monetary history. Libra as the translation of pound is unobjectionable, but solidus—the only coin of that name that obtained wide currency, the solidus aureus of Constantinople—was a gold coin of which 72 went to the pound of gold, and was in intrinsic value equal to about thirteen shillings of our present money. No scilling that any Anglo-Saxon legislator ever dealt with had any such intrinsic value as this. Similarly the denarius, the true denarius of the republic and of the early empire, was a silver coin intrinsically worth about eightpence of our present currency. No penny in any Anglo-Saxon coinage ever approached this value; and the translation of denarius by penny has introduced confusion even into some well-known passages of the English Bible. Let us, therefore, for the sake of clearness, wholly disregard the pretended Roman equivalents, and confine our attention to the true, long-enduring Saxon denominations, the pund, the scilling and the penig.
1. The pund meant a pound’s weight of silver. It was purely a “money of account,” as no coin representing this value was ever struck by any Anglo-Saxon king. According to the present value of metals, it would be worth intrinsically somewhat less than £2 sterling.
2. The scilling was also only a money of account, represented by no actual coin. Its derivation (from scylan, to divide) seems to point to the fact that it was originally a portion of a silver ornament, probably a torque or an armlet broken off and cast into the scale, for payment by weight of the trader’s demand. Even so, as we may remember, St. Oswald ordered his beautiful silver dish to be broken up and distributed to the starving crowd, who would take these scyllingas into the market and exchange them there for the needed food. At a later time the scilling acquired a definite value, which, however, varied much in the different English kingdoms. The Kentish scilling was one-twelfth of a pound; the Wessex scilling, one-forty-eighth; and the Mercian, one-sixtieth.
3. But however much the scilling might vary, the penny (pending, pening or penig) seems in all the English kingdoms to have ever borne the same proportion to the pound which it bears at present, namely, as 1 to 240. This enables us to state the varying values of the scilling in the following manner:—
| The scilling of | Kent | = | 20 | peningas. |
| Do. | Wessex | = | 5[109] | „ |
| Do. | Mercia | = | 4 | „ |