The tendency towards personal dependence and towards a social organization based on personal dependence received an overpowering impulse from the strife.  The long insecurity of a century of warfare drove the ceorl, the free tiller of the soil, to seek protection more and more from the thegn beside him.  The freeman “commended” himself to a lord who promised aid, and as the price of this shelter he surrendered his freehold to receive it back as a fief laden with conditions of military service.  The principle of personal allegiance which was embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, itself tended to widen into a theory of general dependence.  From AElfred’s day it was assumed that no man could exist without a lord.  The “lordless man” became a sort of outlaw in the realm.  The free man, the very base of the older English constitution, died down more and more into the “villein,” the man who did suit and service to a master, who followed him to the field, who looked to his court for justice, who rendered days of service in his demesne.  The same tendencies drew the lesser thegns around the greater nobles, and these around the provincial ealdormen.  The ealdormen had hardly been dwarfed into lieutenants of the national sovereign before they again began to rise into petty kings, and in the century which follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian thegns following a Mercian or Northumbrian ealdorman to the field though it were against the lord of the land.  Even the constitutional forms which sprang from the old English freedom tended to invest the higher nobles with a commanding power.  In the “great meeting” of the Witenagemot or Assembly of the Wise lay the rule of the realm.  It represented the whole English people, as the wise-moots of each kingdom represented the separate peoples of each; and its powers were as supreme in the wider field as theirs in the narrower.  It could elect or depose the King.  To it belonged the higher justice, the imposition of taxes, the making of laws, the conclusion of treaties, the control of wars, the disposal of public lands, the appointment of great officers of state.  But such a meeting necessarily differed greatly in constitution from the Witan of the lesser kingdoms.  The individual freeman, save when the host was gathered together, could hardly take part in its deliberations.  The only relic of its popular character lay at last in the ring of citizens who gathered round the Wise Men at London or Winchester, and shouted their “aye” or “nay” at the election of a king.  Distance and the hardships of travel made the presence of the lesser thegns as rare as that of the freemen; and the national council practically shrank into a gathering of the ealdormen, the bishops, and the officers of the crown.

[Sidenote:  Feudalism and the Monarchy]