The Folkland becomes terra regis.

Territorial divisions.

the repair of fortresses and bridges (fyrd, burh-bôt, and brycge-bột).

Bôcland might be held for various estates or interests. It was generally alienable inter vivos, devisable by will, and transmissible by inheritance. It might be entailed or limited in descent, in which case the owner was deprived of the power of alienation. The king, like any of his subjects, had private estates of Bôcland which did not merge in the Crown, and over which he exercised the same powers of disposition as a private individual.1 In the course of time much of the Folkland was converted into Bôcland. Large grants were made to the Church, and also to individuals for specific purposes, as for the pay of the king's thegns (thegn-land), of the gerefa (gerefa-land, reve-land), or of the officers of the royal household.

Both Folkland and Bôcland might be leased out to free cultivators, in such quantities and on such terms as the holders pleased. When so leased out, it was termed lænland (land lent or leased).

As the regal office advanced in dignity and power, a tendency set in to substitute the king for the nation as the owner of the national lands; the word Folkland gradually fell out of use, and was replaced by the term terra regis, or crown-land. This tendency reached its climax after the Norman Conquest, when the whole land of the kingdom was regarded as the demesne land of the king, held of him by a feudal tenure.

The community of the magth, united by the tie of kindred, early gave place to the purely territorial division The Township. of the township or vicus, composed of a body of allodial owners associated by the tie of local contiguity, and having its tun-gemôt, or assembly of freemen, and a

1 From the will of King Alfred it is evident that both he and his grandfather Ecgberht had the absolute disposal of their bôcland.-Allen, Inquiry into the Rise and Growth of the Royal Prerogative in England, p. 143, sq.

tun-gerefa as its headman or chief executive officer.1 The townships were grouped together into hundreds, or as they were called in the Anglian districts, wapentakes. An aggregation of hundreds constituted the shire, and the union of shires made up the kingdom.

The Hundred, or Wapentake, a district answering to The Hundred. the pagus of Tacitus, probably has its origin in the primitive settlements, varying in geographical extent, of each hundred warriors of the invading host. The term Wapentake, which clearly has reference to the armed gathering of the freemen, points to the military origin of the hundred, like that of the harred in the Scandinavian kingdoms. In England the names Hundred and Wapentake first appear in the laws of Eadgar (A.D. 959-975) in connection with the police organization of the kingdom. By this time the term Hundred, originally denoting certain personal relations of the inhabitants of a district, had probably acquired its territorial signification as a subdivision of the shire or kingdom to which it belonged. It had its hundred-gemót, which took cog- Its organization. nizance of all matters, criminal and civil, arising within

1 The tun is originally the enclosure or hedge, whether of the single farm or of the enclosed village, as the burk is the fortified house of the powerful man. The corresponding word in Norse is gardr, our garth or yard. The equivalent German termination is ham, our ham; the Danish form is by (Norse, bú=German, bau).'—Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 82.

2 The difficulty in determining the principle upon which the Hundreds were established is increased by the fact that they are most numerous in some of the smaller shires. Kent contains 61, Sussex 65, Dorsetshire 34 hundreds; while Lancashire has only six. A probable explanation of this disproportion, and a further argument in favour of a military origin, may be derived from the fact that the small southern counties were the districts first conquered, and therefore the most densely populated by the new settlers. The county of Kent is divided into six lather, of nearly equal size, having the jurisdiction of the hundreds in other shires. The lathe may be derived from the Jutish 'lething' (in modern Danish 'leding)-a military levy. The singular division of Sussex into six 'rapes (each of which is subdivided into hundreds), seems also to have been made for military purposes. The old Norse 'hreppr' denoted a nearly similar territorial division. (See Lappenberg, England under the Anglo-Saxons, by Thorpe, i. 96, 107.) Two counties, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, were divided into Trithings or Thirds (which still subsist in Yorkshire under the corrupted name of Kidings), and these were subdivided generally into wapentakes.

The Shire.

Organization and officers.

The ealdorman.

the hundred, and was attended by the thegns of the hundred and by the representative town-reve and four men from each township. The chief executive officer was the hundred-man or hundreds-ealdor, who convened the hundred-gemôt. He was generally, and at first always, elective; but as the personal gradually gave way to the territorial influence, he was in many places nominated by the thegn or other great man to whom the hundred belonged.

The division into Shires (a word originally signifying merely a subdivision or share of any larger whole) is very ancient, but the period at which this arose is uncertain. We have evidence that in Wessex the division into shires existed as early as the end of the 7th century, long V anterior to the time of Ælfred, to whom their institution has been popularly attributed. In the laws of Ini, King of the West Saxons (A.D. cir. 690), provision is made for the case of a plaintiff failing to obtain justice from his scir-man, or other judge; if an ealdorman compound a felony it is declared that he shall forfeit his scir; and the defendant is forbidden to secretly withdraw from his lord into another scir. As Wessex gradually annexed the other kingdoms, these naturally fell into the rank of shires; or where they themselves had arisen from the union of several early settlements, were split up into several shires on the lines of the old tribal divisions.1

The government of the shire was administered by an caldorman and the scir-gerefa, or sheriff. The ealdorman (the princeps of Tacitus and the comes of the Normans) was originally elected in the general assembly of

On the various origin of the different historical shires or counties, see Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 109.

The constitutional machinery of the shire represents either the national organization of the several divisions created by West Saxon conquest; or that of the early settlements which united in the Mercian kingdom, as it advanced westward; or the rearrangement by the West Saxon dynasty of the whole of England on the principles already at work in its own shires.' -Id. 110.

the nation; but there was a constant and increasing tendency to make the office hereditary in certain great families. On the annexation of an under-kingdom, the ealdormanship usually became hereditary in the old royal house; but in all cases, down to the Norman. Conquest, the consent of the King and Witan was required at each devolution of the office. Sometimes several shires were administered by one ealdorman, but this arrangement did not involve an amalgamation of the separate organizations of each shire. The sheriff, The Sheriff. or vice-comes, as he was termed after the Norman Conquest, was the special representative of the regal or central authority, and as such usually nominated by the king.1 He was judicial president of the scir-gemôt, or shiremoot, executor of the law, and steward of the royal demesne. At first the sheriff seems to have exercised co-ordinate authority with the ealdorman, but gradually the civil administration became almost entirely concentrated in the former, leaving to the latter, as his principal function, the command of the military force of the shire. Unlike the office of ealdorman, the sheriffdom, as a rule, never became hereditary. This circumstance was productive of important constitutional effects after the Norman Conquest, as the kings found ready to hand a machinery which enabled them to effectually assert the central authority in every shire, and thus to check the growth of local feudal jurisdictions. The burk, or town, was in its origin simply a more The Burgh. strictly organized form of the township. It was probably in a more defensible position; had ditch or mound instead of the quickset hedge or "tun" from which the township took its name; and as the "tun" was originally

1 'It is probable, on early analogy, that the gerefa was chosen in the folkmoot; but there is no proof that within historical times this was the case, although the constitutionalists of the thirteenth century attempted to assert it as a right, and it was for a few years conceded by the Crown.'Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 113.

C

the fenced homestead of the cultivator, the "burh" was the fortified house and court-yard of the mighty manthe king, the magistrate, or the noble.'1

Other 'burhs' were gradually developed out of the village township, or were founded on the folkland. In these the municipal authority was similar to that of the Its organization. free township. The chief magistrate was the gerefa, in mercantile places the port-gerefa, in others the wic or tun-gerefa, who presided in the burh-gemôt, or meeting of all the freeholders of the burh. In the larger towns, which were made up of a cluster of townships or lordships, the organization more nearly resembled that of the hundred than that of the simple township.

The Guilds.

Side by side with the town constitution, and to a certain extent influencing its development, was the organization of the municipal guilds. The ancient municipal guilds (so called from gildan, to pay or contribute) were voluntary associations for ecclesiastical or secular purposes, analogous to our modern clubs. By some the guilds have been regarded as an inheritance. from the Roman municipal constitution; but an uninterrupted Roman descent can nowhere, in England, be traced. The similarity to be found in the oldest municipal denominations and institutions on both sides of the German Ocean points rather to a common origin in the ancient heathen sacrificial guilds, in which the common banquet, 'the cradle of many a political institution,' formed a leading feature. The suppression of these devil's guilds (deofol-gild), as they were termed in the Christian laws, proving extremely difficult, they were for the most part continued, with the substitution of Christian for heathen rites. Some guilds had for their principal object the mutual defence of their members and the preservation of peace; and by the laws of The 'frith-gild.' Ini and Ælfred, in case of homicide of or by one of the

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 92.

2 Lappenberg, England under the Anglo-Saxons, by Thorpe, i. 350.