Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

shillings for a ceorl's wife. This might be paid in live property, and no man might sell another for it. For the degrees of intimacy with a ceorl's wife, which are specified, various fines were exacted.i

The earliest Saxon laws were attentive to this vice: in those of Ethelred fifty shillings were the appointed penalty for intimacy with the king's maiden, half that sum with his grinding servant, and twelve shillings with another, or with an earl's cup-bearer. The chastity of a ceorl's attendant was guarded by six shillings, and of inferior servants by the diminished penalty of fifty and thirty scættas

By the same laws, for a rape on a servile woman, the offender was to pay her owner fifty shillings, and then to buy her at the will of her owner. If she was pregnant, he was to pay thirtyfive shillings, and fifteen shillings to the king, and twenty shillings if betrothed to another.

Their high estimation and rigorous exaction of female virtue, even among the servile, is strongly implied in this passage of one of Bede's works:

In the courts of princes there are certain men and women moving continually in more splendid vestments, and retaining a greater familiarity with their lord and lady. There it is studiously provided, that none of the women there who are in an enslaved state should remain with any stain of unchastity; but if by chance she should turn to the eyes of men with an immodest aspect, she is immediately chided with severity. There some are deputed to the interior, some to the exterior offices, all of whom carefully observe the duties committed to them, that they may claim nothing but what is so entrusted. V. viii. p. 1067.

CHAPTER IX.

Classes and Conditions of Society.

EVERY man in the Anglo-Saxon society beneath the cyning and his family was in one of these classes. He was either in high estimation from his birth; or he was in a state of dignity from office, or from property; or he was a freeman; or a freedman; or he was in one of the servile classes. Thus inequality was as much the character of the Anglo-Saxon society as of our own superior civilization.

The inequality of society is the source of perpetual discontent, both against government and Providence; and yet from this * Ibid. p. 7.

Wilk. Leg. Sax. p. 37.

j Ibid. p. 3.

inequality have arisen all the comforts that cause us to be displeased with it. In natural birth, in natural powers, in natural merit, in the womb and in the grave, we are all equal; but it is in nature an equality of destitution and want; of capability and desire; of the necessity of exertion; of destiny and hope. Mankind began their mortal race alike both in privation and in power. Nature extended her riches impartially before all. She favoured neither of her first-born sons. The materials of all the conveniences of life, which civilization has since acquired, were present to every eye, and attainable by every hand.

But the very freedom of mind and action with which nature has blessed mankind, and the impulse of the privations amid which we originated, soon terminated this equality of want, and began the acquisition of comforts and abundance. No man has from nature any advantages above his fellows: no one comes into life with four arms, or twenty eyes: none leap into birth armed and full-formed Minervas; but all being free to use their capabilities as they please, the exertion of this liberty produced inevitable inequality in anterior times, as in every subsequent age. It is not merely that the industrious will amass more conveniences than the idle, the provident more than the careless, the economist than the profuse; but the different tastes and feelings of men throw them into different social positions both of rank and property. The hunter and the fowler will not raise stores of corn like the husbandman, nor can he acquire the riches and commodities of the merchant. The warrior, abandoning the paths which the preceding characters prefer, cannot therefore, of himself, obtain the comforts which they value and pursue, but gains an estimation and consequence in the social talk, which gratifies him more than the ship-loads of foreign commerce, or the replenished granaries of the agriculturist. The artisan, attached to his humble but cherished tranquillity, neither feels nor envies the dangerous honours of the soldier, nor the risks and sufferings of the trading navigator. Thus mankind, obeying the tendency of their various dispositions, fill social life with inequality, and, by pursuing such diversified roads, are for ever multiplying the conveniences and enjoyments of life, though the dissimilar acquisition of these, from the exertion of individual liberty of will and action, is perpetually augmenting the inequality complained of. The truth is, that, by these various pursuits, the comforts of every class, even of the lowest, are inconceivably increased. Our common farmers now fare better than the thegns and knights of the Anglo-Saxon days; and the cottages of our day-labourers have many more conveniences, and their life fewer privations, than most of the Anglo-Saxon classes of society enjoyed below the baron, the thegn, and the knight, and some even which the latter of these had not: to instance only one circumstance—the

comforts of a chimney and its cleanliness. Most of our early ancestors lived at home amid smoke and dirt, with one of which, at least, life would, to the poorest among us, seem intolerable; yet Alcuin, the Anglo-Saxon abbot who was reproached for having ten thousand slaves or vassal peasantry at his command, lived in a habitation sordid with smoke, and affecting his eyes, which he refused to quit for the gilded arched roofs of Italy, the remains of Roman luxury, to which the emperor invited him.

It is the glory of civilized life, for the more successful possessor of its advantages to diffuse them, from his own stores, as far as he is able, wherever he observes them to be painfully deficient.

There was certainly among our Anglo-Saxon ancestors a personal distinction arising from birth. Individuals are described in these times as noble by descent. The expression ethelboren, or noble born, occurs several times, even in the laws. A very forcible passage on this subject appears in the life of St. Guthlac: “There was a noble (ethela) man in the high nation of the Mercians; he was of the oldest race, and the noblest (æthelstan) that was named Iclingas." The sense of this cannot be mistaken: a family is expressly distinguished from the rest by an appropriated name "Iclingas." We may recollect here that Iornandes says of the Goths, that they had a noble race called the Balthæ, from whence Alaric sprung. In the canons of Edgar another decisive passage attests, that superiority of birth was felt to convey superior consequence; for it was found necessary to require, "that no forth-boren priest despise one that is less born, because, if men think rightly, all men are of one origin." No peculiar titles, as with us, seem to have distinguished the nobly born; they were rather marked out to their fellows by that name of the family which had become illustrious, as the Fabii and Cornelii of the Romans. Their title was formed by the addition of ing to the name of the ancestor whose fame produced their glory. Thus from Uffa his posterity was called Uffingas. So Beowulf, the hero of an Anglo-Saxon poem, was one of the Scyldingas.

Beowulf was illustrious;
The fruit wide sprang

Of the posterity of the Scylde.

He writes to the emperor, who had urged him to visit Rome: "You blame me for preferring the houses of Tours, sordid with smoke, to the gilded arches of the Romans; I would say, with your leave, that iron (swords) hurts the eyes more than smoke. Contented with the smoky houses, I remain here in peace." Ep. xiii. p. 1507.

b 3 Gale Script. 395, 417, 418.

CMS. Vesp. D. 14, p. 36, 120, and Wilk. Leg. Sax. 37. d MS. Vesp. D. 21, p. 19.

f Wilk. Leg. Sax. 83.

Sce vol. i. of this work. & Polych. Higd. 3 Gale, p. 224.

Then was in the burghs
Beowulf, the Scyldinga,
The dear king of his people.

With them the Scyld
Departed to the ship,

While many were prone to go
In the path of their lord.
They him then bore

To the journey of the ocean

As his companions,

He himself commanded;

Whence with words they governed

The Scyldinga of battle.

The birth that was thought illustrious conferred personal honour, but no political rank or power. No title was attached to it which descended by heirship and gave a perpetuity of political privileges. That was a later improvement. In theoretical reasoning, and in the eye of religion, the distinction of birth seems to be an unjust prejudice; we have all, as our Great Alfred and Boetius sang, one common ancestor, and the same Creator, Protector, and Judge; but the morality and merit of society is the product of very complicated and diversified motives, and is never so superabundant as to suffer uninjured the loss of any one of its incentives and supporters. The fame of an applauded ancestor has stimulated many to perform noble actions, or to preserve an honourable character, and will continue so to operate while human nature exists. It creates a sentiment of honour, a dread of disgrace, a useful pride of name, which, though not universally efficient, will frequently check the vicious propensities of passion or selfishness, when reason or religion has exhorted in vain. The distinction of birth may be therefore added to the exaltation of the female sex, as another of those peculiarities which have tended to extract from the barbarism of the Gothic nations a far nobler character than any that the rich climates of the East could rear.

That there was a nobility from landed property, distinct from that of birth, attainable by every one, and possessing (what noble birth had not of itself) political rank and immunities, is clear, from several passages. It is mentioned in the laws, as an incentive to proper actions, that through God's gift a servile thræl may become a thane, and a ceorl an eorl, just as a singer may become a priest, and a bocere (a writer) a bishop. In the time of Ethelstan it is expressly declared, that if a ceorl have the full proprietorship of five hides of his own land, a church, and kitchen, a bellhouse, a burghate-seat, and an appropriate office in the king's i Wilk. Leg. Sax. 112,

MS. Cott. Lib. Vit. A. 15, p. 129, 130.

hall, he shall thenceforth be a thegn, or thane, by right. The same laws provide that a thegn may arrive at the dignity of an eorl, and that a massere, or merchant, who went three times over sea with his own craft, might become a thegn. But the most curious passage on this subject is that which attests, that without the possession of a certain quantity of landed property, the dignity of sitting in the witena-gemot could not be enjoyed, not even though the person was noble already. An abbot of Ely had a brother who was courting the daughter of a great man; but the lady refused him, because, although noble, he had not the lordship of forty hides, and therefore could not be numbered among the proceres or witena. To enable him to gratify his love and her ambition, the abbot conveyed to him certain lands belonging to his monastery. The nuptials took place, and the fraud was for some time undiscovered."

The principle of distinguishing men by their property is also established in the laws. Thus we read of twyhyndum, of syxhyndum, and of twelfhyndum men. A twyhynde man was level in his were with a ceorl," and a twelfhynde with a thegn; and yet Canute calls both these classes his thegns. But though property might confer distinction, yet it was the possession of landed property which raised a man to those titles which might be called ennobling. Hence it is mentioned, that though a ceorl should attain to a helmet, mail, and a gold-hilted sword, yet if he had no land he must still remain a ceorl,

The species of nobility which was gained by official dignities appears to have appertained to the ealdorman, the eorl, the heretoch, and the thegn, when he was a king's thegn. A certain portion of rank was also conceded to the gerefa and the scir-reve. There was a still inferior degree of consequence derived from being ealdor of a hundred, and such like minor offices, which the laws sometimes recognise."

The dignity from office conferred some beneficial distinction on the family of the person possessing it; for the laws speak of an eorlcunde widow, and defend her by exacting compensations, for wrongs committed against her, much superior to those of other

women.s

Official dignities were conferred by the king, and were liable to be taken away by him on illegal conduct. This is the language with which, according to Asser, Alfred addressed his great

[blocks in formation]

m Wilk. Leg. Sax. 25, 33.
° Leg. Sax. 16.

P "I Cnut, king, greet Lyfing, archbishop; and Ethelwine, shire-man, and all my thegns, twelf-hynde and twi-hinde friendlily." Wanley, Cott. MSS. p. 181.

Leg. Sax. 71.

As in the caldor of the hundred. Leg. Sax. 81. 'Leg. Sax. 7.

« ElőzőTovább »