tongs and held Dunstan their master by the nose! Let us turn from those rude smithies, and the ruder traditions of the demon apprentices, and look upon the engine and the machine making of the Stephensons, Sharps, Fairbairns, Roberts's, or Nasmyths of Manchester, or into the workshops of a thousand other master mechanics throughout the kingdom, and what see we? Machinery, as if it had mind and soul within it, is making machinery; making it to work in the mine, in the ship, at the factory, at the forge, with the spindle, with the shuttle, with the hammer, with the file, upon water, upon earth, and upon all the materials which come out of water or of earth. Machinery making machinery, as if every motion was an impulse of benevolence, each heave of the motive steam an aspiration for human well-being; making it to comfort and clothe the body, to transmute the body's rags for the mind's highest services; making machinery to imprint, while it is yet the sleeping time of night, mind-enlarging thoughts in endless multiplication of copies; machinery making machinery to take the speed of the wind to all the compass points at once, from whence the wind ever blew, to scatter millions of thoughts among millions of thinkers while the sun is still but rising; making machinery to subdue time and space, highest mountains and widest oceans, to achieve conquest over enmities as deep as oceans-over differences of language, race, and prejudice, obdurate as mountain rocks and almost as ancient. And who stands by to guide that machinery whose motion is thus to create power to multiply and reproduce? Not the evil demons whom ignorance associated with Dunstan, when English iron-working was first begun, for all the services done for mankind here are beneficent, righteous, and spirit freeing; not the divinities fabled to be godlike, for there is nothing done here which is magical or mysterious, all is explicable, scientific, simple. Mechanic journeymen and apprentices of intelligent thought, of skilful hand, direct the bellows to blow the furnace, the hammers to strike the heated iron, the chisels to cut it, the incisors to incise it, the planes to plane it, the lathes to fashion it, the screws to screw and join it, and the rivets to rivet it; and when it is fitted, joined, rivetted, and built into an engine, they give it fire and water, and it heaves and blows, and takes upon itself the offices of life and the power of locomotion, and performs more wonderful feats of strength than is attributed even in tradition to that fabled assistant whom Dunstan led forth to work by the nose with his red hot tongs.

That Dunstan was a politician, so acute in his tactics as to be accounted in history a cunning schemer, we easily need

believe. No other species of political talent could have raised him, as a monk, to be successively abbot, bishop, archbishop, and pope's legate, in times of such turbulence, and during the reign of no less than seven kings. Had he been a less ambitious man, he would have been less useful to the age in which he lived and to posterity. Had he been a less talented and patriotic man, yet not less ambitious, he would have been content to rule as an archbishop without instructing mankind and sowing the seeds of civilisation through his country as a mechanic. To his counsel given to the sovereigns under whom he lived, and to his own episcopal injunctions to the clergy whom he governed, to have all monasteries associated with workshops for the practice and diffusion of the mechanical arts, England, in her subsequent ages of industry, is deeply indebted; more indebted to Dunstan than to any single improver of the science of mechanics after him until James Watt.

But he was a painter as well as a worker in iron and all other metals. A picture of the Saviour, with Dunstan prostrate, painted by himself, and bearing inscriptions from his own hand, is still preserved at Oxford. Another branch of art to which he applied himself was somewhat analogous to the designer or pattern drawer of modern calico printers. He drew the patterns for the colours in lady's robes, coloured them, and instructed others in the art. Historians, living long after the semi-barbarous age of Dunstan, have ridiculed this distinguished churchman for the supposed puerility or vulgarity of his pastimes; they themselves being inexcusably ignorant of the unspeakable services rendered to all posterity by a man in his position rescuing a nation from industrial lethargy and ignorance.

The casting of church bells was one of his mechanical employments; and there is reason to believe that he invented moveabletypes for printing. He died in the year 989.

From this period up to the Norman invasion in 1066, there was nothing done by any individual or public event to promote trade, and not much done, save what resulted from incessant wars and revolutions, to deteriorate it. Perhaps the country derived an ultimate advantage from those wars, arising from the invasions of the Danes, which more than counterbalanced the evil done at the time. An adventurous and hardy race of maritime northerns settled in all the seaports, and sowed the ancestral energies of the future mariners of England. There was one man, however, in this period who should not be overlooked-Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester. His services to commerce resulted from his ser

vices to humanity. In conjunction with him, we should alsɔ notice St Augustin, who had devoted himself in the same manner to teach them humanity and the spirit of Christianity several centuries earlier.

SECT. X. THE ANTI-SLAVERY PREACHERS, ARCHBISHOP AUGUSTIN AND BISHOP WULFSTAN.

History affirms that Britain owes the introduction of the Christian religion, through the mission of St Augustin, to the sale of English slaves in Rome. There Gregory, the patron of the Christian missionary, saw them exposed for sale, and, pitying the heathens who made commerce of their children, he sent Augustin to Britain to convert them to religion and humanity. But, unwilling as the Pagan Saxons were to embrace the new religion, they were most obdurately stubborn, and for several centuries they continued obdurate, on the business of slave dealing. Five hundred years after the conversion of the Saxon kings and people nominally to Christianity, there were regular markets for the exportation of slaves to Ireland at Chester and Bristol, those cities being the chief ports for Irish intercourse, slaves being the chief commodity exchanged for gold and silver, of which Ireland then possessed more than England. The superior knowledge of the industrial arts among the Irish in that age, which the remnants of architecture and records of learning still attest, was doubtless the attractive cause which induced the slave commerce with the less civilized but commercially inclined Saxons. William of Malmesbury, writing nearly a hundred years after the Norman conquest, affirms that the practice of selling even their nearest relations had not been entirely abandoned in Northumberland. Possibly the Romans, who were the first slave dealers in Britain whom we read of, and remnants of whom remained long in Northumberland, their descendants are alleged to be traceable there to this day-possibly the slave selling was both introduced and continued by them.

In the biography of Bishop Wulfstan, written about the time of the Norman conquest, we read the following:

"There is a seaport town called Bristol, opposite to Ireland, into which its inhabitants make frequent voyages on account of trade. Wulfstan cured the people of this town of a most inveterate custom, which they derived from their ancestors, of buying men and women in all parts of England and exporting them to Ireland for the sake of gain. They carried women to market in their pregnancy that they might get a better price. You might have seen, with sorrow, long

ranks of young persons, of both sexes and of the greatest beauty, tied together with ropes, and daily exposed for sale; nor were they ashamed-oh, horrid wickedness!-to give up their nearest relations, nay, their own children, to slavery. Wulfstan, knowing the obstinacy of those people, sometimes stayed two months among them, preaching every Lord's day, by which, in process of time, he made so great an impression upon their minds, that they abandoned that wicked trade, and set an example to all the rest of England to do the same."

In the reign of the second Ethelred, between 978 and 1016, laws were passed, by the influence of the church, forbidding the sale of slaves out of the kingdom. But laws were enacted rather as admonitions than as statutes. The trade was not abolished until a later period.

The relative proportions of freemen and bondmen, and the various classes of those in bondage immediately before the Norman invasion, have been thus recorded.

SECT. XI.CLASSES OF SAXON SOCIETY.

The population of England was then, about the year 1050, estimated at 1,800,000.

In thirty-four counties the burgesses and citizens amounted to 17,105; villains to 102,704; bordars to 74,823; cottars, 5947; serfs or thralls, to 26,552; the remaining population consisted of freemen, ecclesiastics, knights, thanes, and landowners. Two-thirds of the entire population, subsisted in different degrees of servitude, though the persons strictly slaves were not above one out of every seven of the higher laborious classes of villains, bordars, and cottars.

The price of a slave was quadruple that of an ox-slaves and cattle formed the living money. They passed current in the payment of debts and in the purchase of commodities, at a value fixed by law, and supplied the deficiency of coin. Thus pecus cattle is the origin of the Latin pecunia, money, and of the English word pecuniary. The manumission of a slave to be legal had to be performed in public, in the market, in the Hundred Courts, or in the church, at the foot of the principal altar. The lord, taking the hand of the slave, offered it to the bailiff, sheriff, or clergyman, gave him a sword and a lance, and told him the ways were open, and that he was at liberty to go wheresoever he pleased.

state.

The operatives of the Anglo-Saxons were mostly in a servile The clergy and the great had domestic servants who were qualified to supply them with those articles of trade and manufacture which were in common use. Hence in monas

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teries we find smiths and carpenters, millers, illuminators, architects, agriculturists, and fishermen. Smiths and carpenters were the most numerous and important, as ministering to the chief secular pursuits of the time-war and agriculture.

The shoemaker was a comprehensive trade, uniting branches that now form distinct businesses, as appears from the following list of articles he fabricated:-Ankle-leathers, shoes, leather hose, bottles, bridles, thongs, trappings, flasks, boiling vessels, leather neck-pieces, halters, wallets, and pouches.

The salter, baker, cook, and fisherman, were common occupations.

The art of dyeing scarlet by the help of an insect was discovered about 1000. Weaving and embroidery were practised. Edward the Elder had his daughters taught to exercise their needles and distaff. Indeed spinning was the common occupation of the Anglo-Saxon ladies. Alfred, in his will, calls the female part of his family the "spindle-side." So, too, Egbert, when entailing his estates on his male descendants to the exclusion of females, says "To the spearside, and not to the spindle-side." Of the skill and industry of the ancient spinsters we have an extraordinary instance in the tapestry which is still preserved in the cathedral of Bayeux. This curious relic of antiquity is a vast linen web 214 feet long, and two broad, on which is embroidered the history of the conquest. It is supposed to have been executed by English women under the direction of Matilda, wife of William I. Many of the figures are without stockings, though none are without shoes, which makes it probable that shoes were more generally used than stockings at this period. The common people, for the most part, had no stockings, nor any other covering on their legs, and e even the clergy celebrated mass with their legs bare, till a law was made against the practice in the council of Chalchnythe in 785. Wooden shoes, which are now esteemed the marks of the greatest indigence and misery, were worn by the greatest princes of Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries.

From the custom of kings making presents of rich garments, vases, bracelets, and rings to their Witans and courtiers, and of great lords doing the same to their knights, the trade for making these must have had much employment. One of the Saxon trades seems to have been the tavern or public-house; for a priest is forbidden to drink at the "wine tuns." ale-house and ale-shop are also mentioned in the laws.

An

The Anglo-Saxons, who were unacquainted with the building arts, destroyed the magnificent structures left by the Romans. Nor did they much improve in the knowledge of