The Growth of the English Constitution. Freeman Edward Augustus

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      All our Thanes

      In need-time cheered.

      Now our lord lieth,

      The Earl on the earth,

      That of us each one

      Others should embolden,

      Warmen to the war,

      That while we weapons may

      Have and hold,

      The hard falchion,

      Spear and good sword.”

      Then another speaks;

      The story goes on a little later;

      Lastly another Thegn speaks;

      This institution of military companionship seems to have struck Tacitus with some amazement. He says that this kind of personal relation was among the Germans not thought shameful. This was the natural feeling of a Roman. The duty of a Roman citizen was wholly towards the state. The state might be represented either by a responsible magistrate or by an irresponsible Emperor; in either case obedience was due to the representative of the state; but there was no personal relation to the man. The old Roman institution of patron and client, which was so like the German comitatus, had pretty well died out by the time of Tacitus, and it had at no time been entered into by men of high rank53. What amazed Tacitus was that among the Germans the noblest in birth and exploits were not looked on as dishonoured by entering the service of a personal lord. To Tacitus himself Trajan was the chief magistrate of the Roman commonwealth, the chief commander of the Roman army; he was a personal master to none but his slaves and freedmen54. It was only in a much later stage of the Roman Empire that personal service in the court and household of the Emperor began to be looked on as honourable55. But among the Teutonic nations the personal relation coloured everything; personal service towards a King or other chief was honourable from the beginning; the proudest nobles of Europe have down to this day thought themselves honoured by filling offices about the persons of Emperors, Kings, and other princes which Tacitus would have deemed beneath the dignity of any Roman citizen. We are now accustomed to see this kind of service paid in the case of royal personages only; a few centuries back men of any rank deemed themselves honoured by paying the like service to men of the rank next above their own, or even to men of their own rank who had the start of them in age and reputation. The knight was served by his esquire and the master by his scholar; and the same principle, laid aside everywhere else, lingers on in what is undoubtedly a trace of the Teutonic comitatus, the fagging of our public schools. Now the political effect of the existence of the principle of personal service, the institution of the comitatus, alongside of the primitive political community, was most important in our early history. The personal relation went far to swallow up the purely political one. To enter the service of a chief became so established a practice that at last it was deemed that it was the part of every man to “seek a lord,” as the phrase was, to commend himself, to put himself under the protection of some man more powerful than himself56. The man owed faithful service to his lord; the lord owed faithful protection to his man. The very word Lord, in its older and fuller form Hlaford, implies the rewards which the lord bestowed on his faithful man. The word is in some sort a puzzling one; but there can be no doubt that it is connected with hlaf, loaf, and that its general meaning is the giver of bread57. Now herein lurks something which has greatly affected all later political and social arrangements. The institution of the comitatus in its first state had nothing whatever to do with the holding of land. But the man looked for reward of his faithful service at the hands of his lord; he looked for the bread of which his lord’s title proclaimed him as the giver. There was of course no form of reward, no form of bread, so convenient or so honourable as that of a grant of land to be held as the reward of past and the condition of future service. Moreover the custom of granting out lands to be held by the tenure of military service had become common in the later days of Roman power58. Such lands were of course held, not of the Emperor as a personal lord, but of the Roman Commonwealth of which he was the head and representative. But the custom of holding lands by military service fell in well with the Teutonic institution of personal service, and the union of the two in the same person produced that feudal relation which has had such an important bearing on all political and social life through the whole of the middle ages and down to our own time. The land granted by the lord to his man, or the land which the man agreed to hold as if it had been so granted, might be a kingdom held of the Emperor or the Pope, or it might be the smallest estate held of a more powerful neighbour. In either case, such a holding by military service was a fief, and from the institution of such fiefs the so-called Feudal System, with all its manifold workings for good and for evil, had its rise. But so far as the Feudal System existed, either in England or in any other country, it existed wholly as a system which had grown up by the side of an earlier system which it wholly or partially displaced. The feudal tenant, holding his land of a lord by military service gradually supplanted, wholly or partially, in most countries of Europe, the allodial holder who held his land of no other man, and who knew no superior but God and the Law59. In England this change took place only gradually and partially; it was through the Norman Conquest, or, more accurately, through the subtle legal theories which came in with the Norman Conquest, that it was finally established. And, after all, it was rather in theory than in fact that it was established. The Feudal System, as something spreading into every corner of the land, and affecting every relation of life, never obtained the same complete establishment in England which it did in some continental countries.

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