In its village-moots lay our
Parliament; in the gleeman of its village-feasts our Chaucer and our
Shakspere; in the pirate-bark stealing from creek to creek our Drakes and
our Nelsons. Even the national temper was fully formed. Civilization,
letters, science, religion itself, have done little to change the inner
mood of Englishmen. That love of venture and of toil, of the sea and the
fight, that trust in manhood and the might of man, that silent awe of the
mysteries of life and death which lay deep in English souls then as now,
passed with Englishmen to the land which Englishmen had won.

[Sidenote: The King]

But though English society passed thus in its completeness to the soil of
Britain, its primitive organization was affected in more ways than one by
the transfer. In the first place conquest begat the King. It seems
probable that the English had hitherto known nothing of kings in their
own fatherland, where each tribe was satisfied in peace time with the
customary government of village-reeve and hundred-reeve and ealdonnan,
while it gathered at fighting times under war leaders whom it chose for
each campaign. But in the long and obstinate warfare which they waged
against the Britons it was needful to find a common leader whom the
various tribes engaged in conquests such as those of Wessex or Mercia
might follow; and the ceaseless character of a struggle which left few
intervals of rest or peace raised these leaders into a higher position
than that of temporary chieftains. It was no doubt from this cause that
we find Hengest and his son AEsc raised to the kingdom in Kent, or AElle in
Sussex, or Cerdic and Cynric among the West Saxons. The association of
son with father in this new kingship marked the hereditary character
which distinguished it from the temporary office of an ealdorman. The
change was undoubtedly a great one, but it was less than the modern
conception of kingship would lead us to imagine. Hereditary as the
succession was within a single house, each successive king was still the
free choice of his people, and for centuries to come it was held within a
people's right to pass over a claimant too weak or too wicked for the
throne. In war indeed the king was supreme. But in peace his power was
narrowly bounded by the customs of his people and the rede of his wise
men. Justice was not as yet the king's justice, it was the justice of
village and hundred and folk in town-moot and hundred-moot and folk-moo