66 English and Continental Backgrounds
nobility and an oppressed peasantry. This had happened
in many places on the continent as it had not on the
island.
A vast deal of study has been put on the question of the
freedom or non-freedom of the bulk of Englishmen both
before and after the Conquest, and the answer must be
that the bulk were not nobles or slaves and that they did
not understand technical, absolute freedom or non-
freedom. It seems more profitable in a book which
touches human progress towards self-government, to
raise the question of public responsibility. To what
extent and in what ways were common men (whether
"free" or not) called upon by any public authority to do
things of a public nature which demanded and developed
qualities of initiative, self-reliance, judgment, self-control?
A slight knowledge of this period shows that the ordinary
Englishman was expected to do many things which had no
direct connection with the economic problem of daily
bread, and that he took these as a routine part of his life
as much as sowing and reaping his fields.
Attendance at the local courts—hundred, shire, bor-
ough, or manor—immediately suggests itself as one of the
most routine obligations of the people. Who went and
how often are matters that have already been discussed.*
1 See above, pp. 17,18. In the so-called Laws of Henry I. (Leges Henrici
Primi), an important law book compiled about the middle of Henry I's
reign and which was an attempt to state Anglo-Saxon law with the changes
made in it by the Conqueror and Henry L, is found the following famous
and puzzling statement: " If any of the king's barons or others shall be
lawfully present at the shire, court, he shall be able to acquit the whole
land which he has there in his demesne. It is the same if his steward shall
be lawfully present. If both are of necessity absent, the reeve and priest
and four of the better men of the vill shall be present for all who shall not
have been summoned to the plea by name. We have decreed that it be
observed in the same manner in the hundred . . . concerning the pres-
ence of the lord and steward, or of the priest and reeve and better men."
There is earlier evidence that the lord was coming more and more to rep-
resent his landless men—the men of his household and his demesne lands,
without farms of their own—but we have no contemporary evidence of
the reeve and four men acting for the vill or any element in it in Anglo-
Saxon times. Yet this statement may contain genuine Anglo-Saxon cus-
tom. If so, the practice probably arose late in the period; otherwise some
trace of it would be likely to appear. We shall hear much in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries of the doings of the reeve and four men of the