of Jutland.  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, common social and political institutions.  There is little ground indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the common name of Englishmen.  But 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 people has sprung.

[Sidenote:  The English Village]

Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little.  But from the glimpses that we catch of it when conquest had brought them to the shores of Britain their political and social organization must have been that of the German race to which they belonged.  In their villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us in the England of to-day.  A belt of forest or waste parted each from its fellow villages, and within this boundary or mark the “township,” as the village was then called from the “tun” or rough fence and trench that served as its simple fortification, formed a complete and independent body, though linked by ties which were strengthening every day to the townships about it and the tribe of which it formed a part.  Its social centre was the homestead where the aetheling or eorl, a descendant of the first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood and traditions of his fathers.  Around this homestead or aethel, each in its little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls, men sprung, it may be, from descendants of the earliest settler who had in various ways forfeited their claim to a share in the original homestead, or more probably from incomers into the village who had since settled round it and been admitted to a share in the land and freedom of the community.  The eorl was distinguished from his fellow villagers by his wealth and his nobler blood; he was held by them in an hereditary reverence; and it was from him and his fellow aethelings that host-leaders, whether of the village or the tribe, were chosen in times of war.  But this claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition of his fellow villagers.  Within the township every freeman or ceorl was equal.  It was the freeman who was the base of village society.  He was the “free-necked man” whose long hair floated over a neck which had never bowed to a lord.  He was the “weaponed man” who alone bore spear and sword, and who alone preserved that right of self-redress or private war which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless outrage.

[Sidenote:  Justice]