An enormous amount of the country still remained overgrown with wild forest.  The whole weald of Kent and Sussex, the great tract of Selwood in Wessex, the larger part of Warwickshire, the entire Peakland, the central dividing ridge between the two seas from Yorkshire to the Forth, and other wide regions elsewhere, were covered with primaeval woodlands.  Arden, Charnwood, Wychwood, Sherwood, and the rest, are but the relics of vast forests which once stretched over half England.  The bear still lurked in the remotest thickets; packs of wolves still issued forth at night to ravage the herdsman’s folds; wild boars wallowed in the fens or munched acorns under the oakwoods; deer ranged over all the heathy tracts throughout the whole island; and the wild white cattle, now confined to Chillingham Park, roamed in many spots from north to south.  Hence hunting was the chief pastime of the princes and ealdormen when they were not engaged in war with one another or with the Welsh.  Game, boar-flesh, and venison formed an important portion of diet throughout the whole early English period, up to the Norman conquest, and long after.

The king was the recognised head of each community, though his position was hardly more than that of leader of the nobles in war.  He received an original lot in the conquered land, and remained a private possessor of estates, tilled by his Welsh slaves.  He was king of the people, not of the country, and is always so described in the early monuments.  Each king seems to have had a chief priest in his kingdom.

There was no distinct capital for the petty kingdoms, though a principal royal residence appears to have been usual.  But the kings possessed many separate hams or estates in their domain, in each of which food and other material for their use were collected by their serfs.  They moved about with their suite from one of these to another, consuming all that had been prepared for them in each, and then passing on to the next.  The king himself made the journey in the waggon drawn by oxen, which formed his rude prerogative.  Such primitive royal progresses were absolutely necessary in so disjointed a state of society, if the king was to govern at all.  Only by moving about and seeing with his own eyes could he gain any information in a country where organisation was feeble and writing practically unknown:  only by consuming what was grown for him on the spot where it was grown could he and his suite obtain provisions in the rude state of Anglo-Saxon communications.  But such government as existed was mainly that of the local ealdormen and the village gentry.

Marriages were practically conducted by purchase, the wife being bought by the husband from her father’s family.  A relic of this custom perhaps still survives in the modern ceremony, when the father gives the bride in marriage to the bridegroom.  Polygamy was not unknown; and it was usual for men to marry their father’s widows.  The wives, being part of the father’s property, naturally became part of the son’s heritage.  Fathers probably possessed the right of selling their children into slavery; and we know that English slaves were sold at Rome, being conveyed thither by Frisian merchants.