We observe that we have here a regular local court, armed with very summary powers and able to inflict fines, probably heavy fines, after it has restored the value of the stolen property to the rightful owner. Of these fines, however, the Hundred-court may retain for itself only half, the other half going to “the lord”. The assumption that there will be in every case a lord, who will thus share in the profits of the criminal jurisdiction exercised by his neighbours of the Hundred, seems to mark a step towards the manorial jurisdiction of later centuries and strikes a somewhat different note from that sounded in the laws of Ine. It would seem that there was a tendency among powerful and lawless men to treat the Hundred-court with contempt and ignore its jurisdiction. “If any one shall put difficulties in the way and refuse to obey the decision of the Hundred and this is afterwards proved against him, he shall pay 30 pennies to the Hundred: and for a second offence 60 pennies, half to the Hundred and half to the lord. If he do it the third time he shall pay half a pound (120 pennies), and for the fourth offence he shall forfeit all that he has and be outlawed, unless the king allow him to remain in the land.” By the time that Canute took the matter in hand[216] sharper remedies had been found to be necessary. He who refused the judgment of the Hundred was fined—apparently for the first offence—30 shillings, not pennies. For a similar contempt of the Earl’s court he had to pay a fine of 60 shillings, and twice that amount for despising the judgment of the king.
Before passing from the subject of the Hundred, it should be observed that the corresponding institution in most of the Danish counties of England was called the wapentake, a name which is said to be derived from that clashing together of their weapons whereby the Scandinavians, like their Teutonic predecessors in the days of Tacitus, were wont to signify their assent to the propositions laid before them by the masters of their assemblies. The counties in which the Wapentake generally took the place of the Hundred were York, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Rutland.[217]
“And let men seek the Hundred-gemôt in such manner as was arranged aforetime, and three times in the year let them hold the Burh-gemôt and twice the Shire-gemôt, and there let the bishop of the shire and the ealdorman be present, and there let both of them expound God’s law and the world’s law.” By these words of King Edgar[218] we are brought into contact not only with the Hundred, but also with two other organisations still very prominent in the political life of England, the Borough and the Shire.
The Burh or Burg, in the sense of a fortified town, first comes into notice about the beginning of the tenth century and is evidently the offspring of the Danish invasions. Not that the word was not before that time in familiar use among the Anglo-Saxons,[219] but that it seems rather to have denoted the walled enclosure round the dwelling of a great landowner, than the close-packed streets of a medieval borough. The breaking of such a burh (burh-bryce), the forcible entry into the precincts of a dwelling, was punished by the laws of Ine and Alfred with fines carefully graduated according to the rank of the owner. “A king’s burh-bryce is 120 shillings; an archbishop’s, 90; another bishop’s or an ealdorman’s, 60; a twelf-hynd man’s, 30; a six-hynd man’s, 15 shillings. The breaking down of a ceorl’s hedge (edor-bryce) is 5 shillings.”[220] The meaning of the law evidently is, that “the man whose wer is 600 shillings will probably have some stockade, some rude rampart round his house; he will have a burh, whereas the ceorl whose wer is 200 shillings will not have a burh, but will only have a hedge round his house”.[221]
It was into a country full of unwalled tuns or villages, and scattered country houses calling themselves burhs, but poorly protected by moat and stockade, that the Danes came pouring in the reigns of Egbert, Ethelwulf and Alfred. Winchester itself, as we have seen, was “broken down” by them. York and London were taken, and apparently in this, the first stage of their invasion, no town which they seriously attacked was able to resist their onslaught. But then the invaders gave their victims a lesson in self-defence. As soon as they had taken up a position in town or country they fortified themselves by erecting a strong “work” (the word is of constant occurrence in these pages of the Chronicle), and the hardest part of Alfred’s task was often the capturing of these hastily reared Danish fortifications. In the years of peace between the invasions of Guthrum and of Hasting, Alfred, imitating his opponents, reared many burhs which he filled with armed men. The establishment of these forts which stood up as islands out of the hostile sea, had evidently much to do with the deliverance of the land from the flood of Danish invasion in the terrible years between 892 and 896. The entry of the Chronicle for the year 894 tells us how a portion of the invading army was attacked “by bands of Englishmen, almost every day and night, both from the fyrd and also from the burhs; for the king had divided his fyrd into two parts so that they were always half at home and half out, except the men whose duty it was to hold the burhs”. And a little farther on we hear of the valorous deeds of the burh-ware of Chester and of London, which had an important influence on the successful issue of the war.
We have seen, in a previous chapter, how the stalwart brother and sister, Edward and Ethelfled, reconquered central England for the English, and how they secured their conquests by the great line of forts which they planted everywhere along and sometimes far within the frontier which had divided the two nations. Chester, Shrewsbury, Bridgnorth, Stafford, Warwick, Bedford, Huntingdon, Manchester and many more, were burhs which owed their foundation or renewal to the stout-hearted Lady of the Mercians and her brother. It must not be forgotten, however, that the bulk of the population around, and even in some of these burhs, must have remained Danish. Leicester, Stamford and Nottingham are included in the list of forts founded by Edward and his sister, yet they with Lincoln and Derby made up that Danish confederation of the Five Boroughs with which Edmund had to fight in 942 and which went over so readily to Sweyn in 1013.
In the main, however, we may no doubt consider these new, strongly fortified burhs or, as we may now venture to call them, “boroughs” as the homes of loyal Englishmen, keen for resistance to an invading foe, but also keen for commercial enterprise. Very early the kings perceived the importance of insisting on internal peace and orderly life within the limits of the borough. Thus Edmund claims for it the same right of inviolate sanctuary as for the church itself. “If any man seek refuge in a church or in my burh and any one thereafter assault him or treat him ill, he who does this shall be liable to the same punishment as is aforesaid.” Where security was thus provided for, against external enemies by thick walls and deep ditches, against internal strife and anarchy by the proclamation of the king’s peace, wealth was sure to accumulate. Markets were fixed in boroughs, and in order to guard against the ever-dreaded theft of cattle it was ordained with increasing stringency that purchases and sales should take place within their limits. By a law of Edgar[222] it was directed that in every [large] borough thirty-three men should be chosen as “witnesses”; in the smaller boroughs and the hundreds twelve would suffice; and from these we must suppose a smaller number were chosen to attest the validity of every sale by which cattle changed hands. Judging from the example of Londonburh, the greatest of all the boroughs, we may conclude that in these trading, fighting, debating communities much of the most vigorous life of England was to be found in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
We have to note in passing that the obligation to assist in the maintenance and repair of these national defences was one of those which pressed upon all free Englishmen. Fyrd-fare, burh-bote and bridge-bote, the duty of serving in the national army, the duty of building or repairing fortresses, and the like duty in respect of bridges, constituted the triple obligation, the often-mentioned trinoda necessitas, from which no estate of thegn or of ceorl, with whatever other immunities it might be favoured, was ever, except in very rare cases, allowed to be exempt.
* * * * *
Returning to the consideration of King Edgar’s law about local government we observe that it ordains that the shire-gemôt shall be held twice a year under the presidency of the bishop of the shire and the ealdorman. The question of the origin of the existing forty counties into which England is divided is an extremely interesting one, but it can hardly yet be said to have received its final solution. We can see at a glance that some of our counties such as Kent, Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, Surrey, represent old kingdoms or sub-kingdoms of the early “Heptarchic” period. Norfolk and Suffolk are but the two divisions of East Anglia. Yorkshire and Northumberland may stand fairly well for Deira and Bernicia, the generous endowment of St. Cuthbert’s tomb being interposed between them in the shape of the county of Durham. The formation of the three counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire out of Celtic Strathclyde and its adjoining territory is a late and somewhat obscure piece of history; while on the other hand the emergence of Cornwall, Devon, and perhaps we may add Somerset, out of the former kingdom of West Wales, is pretty easily understood by what the Chronicle tells us of the successive victories of West Saxon kings. Wessex itself, as we see from the Chronicle, must have been at an early period, at any rate in the course of the eighth century, divided into its four often-mentioned shires, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. When, however, all these older counties have been dealt with, there yet remains before us an interesting question as to the formation of the counties which are still known colloquially as “the shires,” the score of counties which lie between the Thames and the Humber, between Wales and East Anglia, and which evidently represent pretty fairly the old kingdom of Mercia. These, as a rule, cluster each one round some borough which has given its name to the county. One half of these are called after strong places which, as we are distinctly told, owed their foundation or their renewal to Edward and Ethelfled; these ten being Cheshire, Shropshire,[223] Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Warwickshire and Herefordshire, and we may reasonably conjecture that the remaining shires were carved out nearly at the same time and on a similar plan. There is a great and obvious distinction between all these midland shires named after one central burh, and counties which recall the name of a tribe such as the Sumorsaetan or the South Saxons. The reason for that distinction is evidently that the Mercian shires were made as part of a definite political organisation, after the repulse of the Danish invaders by whom many of the old landmarks had been overthrown.[224] It is probable that many territorial divisions which would have become counties, had Mercia kept the peaceful tenor of her way through the ninth and tenth centuries, districts such as those of the Pecsaetan in the county of the Peak and the Gyrwas in the county of the Fens, may have disappeared from the map of central England owing to the ravages of the Danes. That map is in fact, as remarked by Maitland, a palimpsest, under whose broad black county-names many erased characters lie hidden.[225]