ish in the
conquered land was nothing less than an absolute transfer of English
society in its completest form to the soil of Britain. The slowness of
their advance, the small numbers of each separate band in its descent
upon the coast, made it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or
to call to them when their work was done, the wives and children, the laet
and slave, even the cattle they had left behind them. The first wave of
conquest was but the prelude to the gradual migration of a whole people.
It was England which settled down on British soil, England with its own
language, its own laws, its complete social fabric, its system of village
life and village culture, its township and its hundred, its principle of
kinship, its principle of representation. It was not as mere pirates or
stray war-bands, but as peoples already made, and fitted by a common
temper and common customs to draw together into our English nation in the
days to come, that our fathers left their German home-land for the land
in which we live. Their social and political organization remained
radically unchanged. In each of the little kingdoms which rose on the
wreck of Britain, the host camped on the land it had won, and the
divisions of the host supplied here as in its older home the rough
groundwork of local distribution. The land occupied by the hundred
warriors who formed the unit of military organization became perhaps the
local hundred; but it is needless to attach any notion of precise
uniformity, either in the number of settlers or in the area of their
settlement, to such a process as this, any more than to the army
organization which the process of distribution reflected. From the large
amount of public land which we find existing afterwards it has been
conjectured with some probability that the number of settlers was far too
small to occupy the whole of the country at their disposal, and this
unoccupied ground became "folk-land," the common property of the tribe as
at a later time of the nation. What ground was actually occupied may have
been assigned to each group and each family in the group by lot, and Eorl
and Ceorl gathered round them their laet and slave as in their homeland by
the Rhine or the Elbe. And with the English people passed to the shores
of Britain all that was to make Englishmen what they are. For distant and
dim as their life in that older England may have seemed to us, the whole
after-life of Englishmen was there.