Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 35

long time to evolve a permanent central power that could
meet the governmental need. In the meantime, it must
be supplied by some power that could be developed more
quickly, that is a local power. It occurs to one that there
was already in England a system of local government,
and that there was needed only a fuller development of
this. However natural this may seem, it was not what
took place, and a little reflection will show that no short
process could have made assemblies constituted as were
those of the hundred and shire efficient. The change was
relatively swift, and it meant that the land and the power
were to pass from the hands of the many into the hands
of the few. This was substantially what has happened,
under similar circumstances, in many parts of the world
and at many different times. In a broad sense of the
term, it was a feudal process; it was the acquisition of
economic advantage and some degree of political power
by private individuals.1 Its results in England may be
called Anglo-Saxon feudalism. But the process was far
from complete at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. The
forces causing it were neither so great nor so sudden as
they have, at times, been elsewhere, and the older local
organisation had strength and tenacity. Hence local
conditions in England, upon the eve of the Norman Con-
quest, are hard to understand. There was neither the old
organisation and classification of men nor the new;
society and institutions were in a fluid state, and although
one can see in a way from what and to what they were
tending, he must be contort with hazy ideas as to just
what they were. C, 2JlL j O I '< : •

Of specific processes in this change commendation was
prominent. It was the act by which one man entered
into such a relation with another that the latter became

1 Historians to-day do aot tHj3^^§*IS£^^Q^«t^^^Lt this great
change can be summarized as a change from communltlM» individual-
ism or vice versa or a change from freedom to servility. It cannot be re-
duced to such a simple formula. One thing is sure: a primitive society of
landholding families was becoming through quite natural causes a soci-
ety of landlords and tenants. But this economic change was accompan-
ied by much else.