LVIII. Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard

LXI. Ode. On Intimations of Immortality. Wm. Wordsworth 327

LXII. Hervé Riel . .

LIST OF AUTHORS.

[The figures in the first column refer to literary articles; those in the
second to biographical notes.]

SIXTH READER.

I.

THE FIRST ENGLISHMEN.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.'

FOR the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, the one country which bore the name of England was what we now call Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic from the North Sea. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken only on the western side 10 by meadows which crept down to the marshes and the sea. The dwellers in this district were one out of three tribes, all belonging to the same Low German branch of the Teutonic family, who at the moment when history discovers them were bound together into a confederacy 1 by the ties of a common blood and a common speech. To the north of the English lay the tribe of the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district of Jutland. To the south of them, a number of German tribes had drawn together in their homeland, between 20

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the Elbe and the Ems, and in a wide tract to the Rhine, into the people of the Saxons. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low German branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers them, they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common speech, and common social and political institutions. Each of them was destined to share in the conquest of the land in which we live; and it is from the union of all of them, when its conquest was complete, that the English peo-10 ple has sprung.

Of the temper and life of these English folk in this Old England we know little. But, from the glimpses which we catch of them when conquest had brought these Englishmen to the shores of Britain, their politi-15 cal and social organization must have been that of the German race to which they belonged. The basis of their society was the free landholder. In the English tongue he alone was known as "the man," or "the churl"; and two English phrases set his freedom vividly before us. 20 He was the "free-necked man," whose long hair floated over a neck that had never bent to a lord. He was the "weaponed man," who alone bore spear and sword, for he alone possessed the right which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless outrage, 25 the right of private war. Justice had to spring from each man's personal action; and every freeman was his own avenger. But, even in the earliest forms of English society of which we catch traces, this right of selfdefence was being modified and restricted by a growing s sense of public justice. The "blood-wite," or compensation in money for personal wrong, was the first effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's life and the freeman's limb had each on this

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system its legal price. "Eye for eye," ran the rough code, and "life for life,” or for each fair damages. We see a further step towards the recognition of a wrong as done not to the individual man, but to the people at large, in another custom of the very earliest times. The price of life or limb was paid, not by the wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged. Order and law were thus made to rest in each little group of English people upon the blood-bond which 10 knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by all who were linked by blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been committed to all who were linked by blood to the sufferer from it. From this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of 15 restraining the wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet possess, sprang the first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from wrong-doing, and to suffer with and pay 20 for him if wrong were done. So fully was this principle recognized that, even if any man was charged before his fellow-tribesmen with crime, his kinsfolk still remained in fact his sole judges; for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or his guilt that he had 25 to stand or fall.

The blood-bond gave both its military and social form to Old English society. Kinsmen fought side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings of honor and discipline which held the host together were drawn 30 from the common duty of every man in each little group of warriors to his house. And as they fought side by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on the soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing