England went quicker, earlier, and further in this direction than any other part of the Islands, owing to the wars of invasion and conquest which affected her from the beginning of the ninth to the middle of the twelfth century. War or foreign invasion, whether successful or not, lessens the influence of those who advise action. The prestige of the chief with the community which he represented counted for a great deal. If in dealing with foreign powers the king was hampered by the necessity of consulting his inferiors, it was a weakness of position of which his neighbours took full advantage; nor did friendly foreign powers, especially the popes, desire any such popular interference as might tell for national unity. Where through defeat or other cause the king was reduced to dependence, even theoretical, upon a foreign power, as when England became dependent on the papacy, or Scotland or Wales on England, he was largely relieved from the necessity of popular support and so from popular control.

The Increase of Absolute Power.-If the freemen had had real power the king might not have been able to make compacts with other sovereigns which were not consistent with the freemen's safety. As it was, when the king and Church acted together, as they generally did, the whole social system under which the authority of the king or chief was limited by unwritten customary law, unwritten law very closely defined and very jealously guarded, went altogether by the board.

It was not at once replaced by written law. Whatever exceptions there may be, the writing down of customs only begins in earnest in the twelfth century, though the Church often tried to get from a king at his accession a written charter tying him indefinitely to vague promises of good government. In some respects such charters abolished or modified the tribal customs which they declared. Otherwise all that happened was that the limitations on absolute authority ceased to exist. In consequence the absolutism of the English kingship, and through it of the Scottish kingship, increased until the king alone, with the assistance of a few permanent officials appointed by himself, decided all questions of political importance, all military and naval matters, all matters of finance and general administration. Still further by his control of money, and by

the military force at his disposal, his power continued to increase, until it had eaten out local self-government, had assumed the regulation of all local judicial and fiscal authority, and with it the supervision of the whole system of agriculture and matters relating to land. The king's officers decided questions between the king and those who owed services to him, and they were also judges of the more serious offences liable to lead to the disturbance of order.

The system, as it pervaded all aspects of social and political life, eventually strengthened immensely, at the expense of the lesser men, the kingship, with the assistance of the Church, which, as it acquired large tracts of land and many privileges, grew very wealthy under the new conditions and very powerful, the abbots and bishops taking the position of great feudal chiefs to whom many knights were subordinate tenants.

To counterpoise the power of the barons or lesser men who might always combine against the king, the supreme chief, the Crown made many grants of land to church communities and dignitaries, on condition of military service. A roll taken in the year 1200 shows 52 knights' fees of land as subject to the abbot of St Edmund's as their feudal superior, the Church hiring land to lay fighters on condition of the performances of the services due to the grantor, and in most cases additional rent to the Church.3

The Contrast of Military Organisation. So far as military conditions were concerned it was a most evident advantage that, instead of a perpetual subdivision among members of a family of the right to joint user of the land, the users paying small dues in kind to the local chief, and rendering an unwilling military service as members of the kinship in default of which there was an imperfect sanction by distraint of cattle or a threat of outlawry, there should be one individual responsible for the rendering of military service to a military superior, and that his holding and use of the land should be dependent on the due performance of the military duty. Such a system led by consequence to preference of the eldest son, the best fighting man, as sole holder of the soil from the lord.

In any ancient tribal society, although the land was not

held by tenure of military service, no man was exempt, or considered himself to be exempt, from the elementary duty of defending his possessions and his kinsmen, who with him jointly occupied the land. The monastic chronicler would have you believe that as age approached, the great fighter was suddenly seized with a sense of contrition for his past acts; convinced of the emptiness of this world and forsaking its vanities, he sought to prepare for another in the more spiritual atmosphere of the monastery. The truth was the opposite. It was not that he did not want the world, but that the world did not want him. Men unfit for fighting were not fit to share in the social life; the chief with a blemish went compulsorily into a monastery; the man too old to fight contracted with his son or with some church to support him for the rest of his life. In all the disputes, for instance, between the kings of Norway and the Orkney earls, chiefs of the Western Isles or kings of Man, there is no suggestion that the people were not liable for military service or for scatt or land tax to the king. How far, for the purposes of defence, a man could be called on to serve away from the land he owned or sat on was warmly disputed in all times, depending on the value of the plunder which appealed to his desire, and on the power of the chief to make it uncomfortable for him if he did not go.

The laws of Wales forbid the king to go on a hosting out of his own territory except once a year for six weeks, though he has freedom to make predatory expeditions within it.4 "The head of every family," says the Irish MS., " of the lay grades is to go into battle, and every shield to plunder, i.e. everyone who has a shield to shelter him and is fit for battle is to go upon a plundering excursion." The freeman, they go on to say, owed services " of attack against pirates, strange tribes, and wolves," and of defence "to defend the promontories that bound the territories of strangers," "the lonely passes that lead to any territory whatsoever of the strangers." He might be distrained on for "allowing the cattle of the territory to be driven away past the men watching on the boundaries." 5

The weakness of such a system, as in all cases where it is left to the individual to decide for himself how far it is for

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his interest to do his duty to the community from which he makes a living, lay in the slight provision made for enforcing the penalty. This was either by distraint of the offender's cattle, a sanction which might very easily develop, apart from the interventions of the Brehon, into an irritating private war, if the chief were not very strong or if he had to deal with several stout passive resisters at one time, or by a modified form of outlawry, the reduction or refusal of the customary compensation which would be due to the offender for an injury or to his kinsmen for his death, leaving him to defend himself without protection against all attacks..

The tribesman paid penalties, to be so enforced, for not going to a hosting of his chief or for coming away, the chieftain grades being penalised more on the ground that their presence was the more necessary, or for not helping in the building of fortifications.8 Military service was so far attached to the possession of the land, that, as women were exempt, on the death of a woman one-half of her land reverted to the tribe.

Thus the necessities of war replaced the loose personal relations of the chief and his comites, and the order of battle by families and clans (which continued even to the eighteenth century in North-Western Scotland), by an armed force of picked men, a system of which the essence was that each man below the king held his land not as a freeman entitled as such to share in the use of the common lands, doing service in the interests of the community, but as the individual possessor of land granted to him by an individual superior, to whom alone he was bound to perform services, to whom he pledged his faith, a possession which he might forfeit if the services were not performed for his feud. Such a system substituted individual authority, supported eventually by mercenary forces, for the common interest and the common liabilities.

As the years passed by the very existence of the earlier society seems to have been forgotten.9 The responsible offices of the tribal chiefs to the community became the absolute rights of the king, the source of all power from God through the Church, or of the manorial lord, and the election of the king by the assembly of the people, though it might continue as a form, became a form only, and subordinate to

the religious ceremony of his consecration. The change in this direction was made easier and more natural for England from its suitability to corn culture, with the resultant enclosures and the subsequent speedy change to individual ownership.

But, apart from any corn culture or convenience to trade, England had always been driven, with the shiftings of Western Europe in the many storms of invasion and conquest which beat on her, under the ever-pervading influence of Rome, first of the Empire, then of the early Church, and lastly of the revived and rediscovered Roman law of the East, in this direction of a closely knit Federal Government and of land held in severalty as the connecting link between the Federal State and the community.

The Variation of Feudalism in England. -The change in military efficiency was not in the first instance so great as it might seem to appear. The conditions which in tribal armies enabled a chief to upset all the plans of a campaign at a critical moment,10 operated under the feudal system as it obtained on the Continent almost as effectively. Each landowner or castle-owner, however petty his holding, was an independent prince in his territories (as Henry himself illustrated in his wars against his immediate superior, the king of France), subject only to the customary obligations of his feudal tenancy and to the ultimate argument of brute force, which, apart from any custom, held him in line.

It is assumed sometimes that when John made a great levy to recover Normandy the barons refused to follow him because the tenants of the Norman and English feuds had become separate either by purchase or forfeiture. It is not necessary to go out of the way to invent any such cause. Philip, like John, could only extort the customary aids and feudal dues, and he would most certainly walk delicately so long as John was watching him from the other side. The baron in Normandy had nothing to gain by an invasion from England except risk and the destruction of his property; Philip was on the spot, strong and ready to ravage the duchy before John could get there. The holder in England of Norman feuds had no reason to help to strengthen the hands