are unconfined, and their subsistence is plentiful. The Saxon kingdoms
displayed the face of recent discovery and cultivation; the towns
were small, the villages were distant; the husbandry was languid and
unskilful; four sheep were equivalent to an acre of the best land; an
ample space of wood and morass was resigned to the vague dominion of
nature; and the modern bishopric of Durham, the whole territory from the
Tyne to the Tees, had returned to its primitive state of a savage and
solitary forest. Such imperfect population might have been supplied, in
some generations, by the English colonies; but neither reason nor
facts can justify the unnatural supposition, that the Saxons of
Britain remained alone in the desert which they had subdued. After the
sanguinary Barbarians had secured their dominion, and gratified their
revenge, it was their interest to preserve the peasants as well as the
cattle, of the unresisting country. In each successive revolution, the
patient herd becomes the property of its new masters; and the salutary
compact of food and labor is silently ratified by their mutual
necessities. Wilfrid, the apostle of Sussex, accepted from his royal
convert the gift of the peninsula of Selsey, near Chichester, with
the persons and property of its inhabitants, who then amounted to
eighty-seven families. He released them at once from spiritual and
temporal bondage; and two hundred and fifty slaves of both sexes were
baptized by their indulgent master. The kingdom of Sussex, which spread
from the sea to the Thames, contained seven thousand families; twelve
hundred were ascribed to the Isle of Wight; and, if we multiply this
vague computation, it may seem probable, that England was cultivated by
a million of servants, or _villains_, who were attached to the estates
of their arbitrary landlords. The indigent Barbarians were often tempted
to sell their children, or themselves into perpetual, and even foreign,
bondage; yet the special exemptions which were granted to _national_
slaves, sufficiently declare that they were much less numerous than the
strangers and captives, who had lost their liberty, or changed their
masters, by the accidents of war. When time and religion had mitigated
the fierce spirit of the Anglo-Saxons, the laws encouraged the frequent
practice of manumission; and their subjects, of Welsh or Cambrian
extraction, assumed the respectable station of inferior freemen,
possessed of lands, and entitled to