CAP. 36.  “Let him who takes a thief, or to whom one taken is given, and he then lets him go, or conceals the theft, pay for the thief according to his ‘wer.’  If he be an ealdorman, let him forfeit his shire, unless the king is willing to be merciful to him.”

Now the earliest direct legislation about personal property in a statute is as late as 1100; but this early Saxon law was a recognition of personal property, because a man cannot steal a thing unless there is property.  This section, therefore, implies property in personalty; because a man cannot steal land; but it never occurred to them to pass a law saying that there shall be private property, because that was the unwritten law that they were all supposed to know.

    A.D. 890.  WESSEX.  ALFRED.

CAP. 27.  “If a man, kinless of paternal relatives, fight and slay a man, and then if he have maternal relatives, let them pay a third of the ‘wer’; his guild-brethren a third part; for a third let him flee.  If he have no maternal relatives, let his guild-brethren pay half, for half let him flee.”

    CAP. 28.  “If a man kill a man thus circumstanced, if he have
    no relatives, let half be paid to the king, half to his
    guild-brethren.”

It is very hard for us to understand what that means.  One would infer that the weregild was only paid by a man with relatives on his father’s side.  It doesn’t say that, but that is the inference.  We shall have plenty to say about the guilds later—­the historical predecessors of the modern trades-unions.  We here find the word guild recognized and spoken of in the law as early as 890.

    A.D. 920.  WESSEX.  EDWARD.

“2.  And if a ceorl throve, so that had fully five hides of his own land, church and kitchen, bell-house and burh-gate-seat, and special duty in the king’s hall, then was he thenceforth of thegn-right worthy.

    “6.  And if a merchant throve, so that he fared thrice over the
    wide sea by his own means, then was he thenceforth of thegn-right
    worthy.”

Worldly success has thus always been the foundation of English nobility.

Then there is a good deal about how much you have to pay for a churl, and how much for an earl, and so on, leaving out only the slaves; for all the free people of England in Saxon times were divided into earls and churls; that is, noblemen and agricultural laborers or yeomanry; these were the two estates besides the church, always a class by itself.  Later there grew up the thanes, who were merely large landlords; the law became that a man that had five hides of land, five or six hundred acres, with a farm, should by the mere fact of having that land become a thane, an earl.  That method of ennobling a man by land got to be a way, at that time the only way, by which a churl or a villein could become a nobleman or even be emancipated.  Exactly as now with our American