cise a vast influence on the future of
mankind. This was the principle of representation. The four or ten
villagers who followed the reeve of each township to the general muster
of the hundred were held to represent the whole body of the township from
whence they came. Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing, their
pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a moot which was made by this
gathering of the representatives of the townships that lay within its
bounds, thus became at once a court of appeal from the moots of each
separate village as well as of arbitration in dispute between township
and township. The judgement of graver crimes and of life or death fell to
its share; while it necessarily possessed the same right of law-making
for the hundred that the village-moot possessed for each separate
village. And as hundred-moot stood above town-moot, so above the
hundred-moot stood the Folk-moot, the general muster of the people in
arms, at once war-host and highest law-court and general Parliament of
the tribe. But whether in Folk-moot or hundred-moot, the principle of
representation was preserved. In both the constitutional forms, the forms
of deliberation and decision, were the same. In each the priests
proclaimed silence, the ealdormen of higher blood spoke, groups of
freemen from each township stood round, shaking their spears in assent,
clashing shields in applause, settling matters in the end by loud shouts
of "Aye" or "Nay."

[Sidenote: Social Life]

Of the social or the industrial life of our fathers in this older England
we know less than of their political life. But there is no ground for
believing them to have been very different in these respects from the
other German peoples who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world. Though
their border nowhere touched the border of the Empire they were far from
being utterly strange to its civilization. Roman commerce indeed reached
the shores of the Baltic, and we have abundant evidence that the arts and
refinement of Rome were brought into contact with these earlier
Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts, and shield-bosses which have been
found in Sleswick, and which can be dated not later than the close of the
third century, are clearly either of Roman make or closely modelled on
Roman metal-work. Discoveries of Roman coins in Sleswick peat-mosses
afford a yet more conclusive proof of direct intercourse with the Empire.
But apart from these outer influences the men of