ven a
freeman's children by a slave mother inherited the mother's taint. "Mine
is the calf that is born of my cow," ran an English proverb. Slave cabins
clustered round the homestead of every rich landowner; ploughman,
shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman,
sower, hayward and woodward, were often slaves. It was not indeed slavery
such as we have known in modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare:
if the slave was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his
master could slay him if he would; it was but a chattel the less. The
slave had no place in the justice court, no kinsmen to claim vengeance or
guilt-fine for his wrong. If a stranger slew him, his lord claimed the
damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, "his skin paid for him" under his
master's lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed beast, and
when caught he might be flogged to death. If the wrong-doer were a
woman-slave she might be burned.

[Sidenote: The Moot]

With the public life of the village however the slave had nothing, the
last in early days little, to do. In its Moot, the common meeting of its
villagers for justice and government, a slave had no place or voice,
while the last was originally represented by the lord whose land he
tilled. The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely in the
body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the moot-hill or the sacred
tree where the community met from time to time to deal out its own
justice and to make its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the
freedom of the township, and bye-laws framed and headman and tithing-man
chosen for its governance. Here plough-land and meadow-land were shared
in due lot among the villagers, and field and homestead passed from man
to man by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here strife of farmer
with farmer was settled according to the "customs" of the township as its
elder men stated them, and four men were chosen to follow headman or
ealdorman to hundred-court or war. It is with a reverence such as is
stirred by the sight of the head-waters of some mighty river that one
looks back to these village-moots of Friesland or Sleswick. It was here
that England learned to be a "mother of Parliaments." It was in these
tiny knots of farmers that the men from whom Englishmen were to spring
learned the worth of public opinion, of public discussion, the worth of
the agreement, the "common sense," the general co