nviction to which
discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their force from being
expressions of that general conviction. A humourist of our own day has
laughed at Parliaments as "talking shops," and the laugh has been echoed
by some who have taken humour for argument. But talk is persuasion, and
persuasion is force, the one force which can sway freemen to deeds such
as those which have made England what she is. The "talk" of the village
moot, the strife and judgement of men giving freely their own rede and
setting it as freely aside for what they learn to be the wiser rede of
other men, is the groundwork of English history.

[Sidenote: The Folk]

Small therefore as it might be, the township or village was thus the
primary and perfect type of English life, domestic, social, and
political. All that England has been since lay there. But changes of
which we know nothing had long before the time at which our history opens
grouped these little commonwealths together in larger communities,
whether we name them Tribe, People, or Folk. The ties of race and kindred
were no doubt drawn tighter by the needs of war. The organization of each
Folk, as such, sprang in all likelihood mainly from war, from a common
greed of conquest, a common need of defence. Its form at any rate was
wholly military. The Folk-moot was in fact the war-host, the gathering of
every freeman of the tribe in arms. The head of the Folk, a head who
existed only so long as war went on, was the leader whom the host chose
to command it. Its Witenagemot or meeting of wise men was the host's
council of war, the gathering of those ealdormen who had brought the men
of their villages to the field. The host was formed by levies from the
various districts of the tribe; the larger of which probably owed their
name of "hundreds" to the hundred warriors which each originally sent to
it. In historic times however the regularity of such a military
organization, if it ever existed, had passed away, and the quotas varied
with the varying customs of each district. But men, whether many or few,
were still due from each district to the host, and a cry of war at once
called town-reeve and hundred-reeve with their followers to the field.

The military organization of the tribe thus gave from the first its form
to the civil organization. But the peculiar shape which its civil
organization assumed was determined by a principle familiar to the
Germanic races and destined to exer