soil which his tribe had gained. After tribe had
been joined to tribe, and still more after kingdom had been joined to
kingdom, there were large numbers who ceased to have any interest in
resisting the Welsh on what was, as far as they were concerned, a
distant frontier. Thus, when Ceawlin was fighting to extend the West
Saxon frontiers in the valley of the Severn, it mattered little to a
man whose own allotted land lay on the banks of the Southampton Water
whether or not his English kinsmen won lands from the Welsh near Bath
or Gloucester. The first result of this change was that the king's
war-band formed a far greater proportion of his military force than it
had formed originally. There was still the obligation upon the whole
body of the freemen to take arms, but it was an obligation which had
become more difficult to fulfil, and it must often have happened that
very few freemen took part in a battle except the local levies
concerned in defending their own immediate neighbourhood. A military
change of this kind would account for the undoubted fact that the
further the English conquest penetrated to the west the less
destructive it was of British life. The thegns, or warriors personally
attached to the king, did not want to plough and reap with their own
hands. They would be far better pleased to spare the lives of the
conquered and to compel them to labour. Every step in advance was
marked by a proportionately larger Welsh element in the population.

14. =Political Changes.=--The character of the kingship was as much
affected by the change as the character of the population. The old
folk-moots still remained as the local courts of the smaller kingdoms,
or of the districts out of which the larger kingdoms were composed,
and continued to meet under the presidency of ealdormen appointed or
approved by the king. Four men and a reeve, all of them humble
cultivators, could not, however, be expected to walk up to York from
the shores of the Forth, or even from the banks of the Tyne, whenever
Eadwine needed their counsel. Their place in the larger kingdoms was
therefore taken by the Witenagemot (_The moot of the wise men_),
composed of the ealdormen and the chief thegns, together with the
priests attached to the king's service in the time of heathendom, and,
in the time of Christianity, the bishop or bishops of his kingdom. In
one way the king was the stronger for the change. His counsellors,
like his fighting force, were m