4 English and Continental Backgrounds
and simplicity. Men were interested in the practical
problems of a particular time and locality. These traits
make any records, which they have left, very hard to
interpret. And these records, as we now have them, are
but odds and ends.
A prominent feature of the Anglo-Saxon government,
alike in the separate kingdoms and in England as a whole
after the approximate union of these kingdoms, was a
lack of co-ordination between central and local institu-
tions. A great gap existed, which many Anglo-Saxon
kings strove sturdily, but for the most part unsuccessfully,
to bridge. At the centre were the king and the witan,
strengthened in later times by the king's local officials, the
sheriffs; in the localities, were those institutions and cus-
toms in hundred and shire, by virtue of which the people
lived in some degree of peace and administered a rude
justice. The local government was more important than
the central; that is, most of the real governing was done
by local means. To local institutions and customs, then,
especial study must be given, not because they are inter-
esting puzzles, but because their subject-matter lies at
the root of our study.1
In order to understand how the early Englishmen gov-
erned themselves in their localities, we should be able to
answer such fundamental questions as these: Were the
majority of the men freemen or serfs? Was there a
nobility? How was the land held? Did the people live
together in villages or were they scattered? How were
their local assemblies made up? Were there varying
grades of assemblies, and, if so, how were they related?
How were their laws made and how enforced? Though
they might be multiplied, these inquiries show the kind
of subject-matter and the important lines of investigation
in the early Anglo-Saxon period.2
* It will be seen that England is not alone concerned here, but that
we are looking into some of the basic matters of the constitutional history
of all Germanic peoples.
a It should be said in advance that our knowledge of all Anglo-Saxon
local institutions is still incomplete, and that on many important matters