they defended each other against injury by others outside their organization. If one of their number had injury done him, the fine payable by another mægth or body of kindred was shared by them. They paid the fines or wergelds, and they received them. From this it follows that the family tie was the basis of all government, and the early settlements must have been communities of people of the same kindred. If the kindred had been much scattered they could not have retained their organization. These bodies of kinsmen united together formed a larger political unit of some kind. Thus, by a comparison with what is known to have existed among the German tribes in the early centuries of our era, and what can be traced to a remote period among the Scandian tribes, we can understand the early organization which settlers from these countries brought into England. As an American writer[1] has said: ‘We can now trace the slender thread of political and legal thought, so familiar to our ancestors. through the wild lawlessness of the heptarchy and the confusion of feudalism, and can follow it safely and firmly back until it leads us out upon the wide plains of Northern Germany, and attaches itself at last to the primitive popular assembly, parliament, law-court, and army all in one.’ In our study of the English settlement it is this local administration of the law by the freemen of any district which comes prominently before us in the earliest assemblies or courts which we can trace, and in the organization of the later Hundred Court. This principle of local justice, which survived so long in England in a modified form, notwithstanding many political changes, has left the names of its courts in the names of some of the extinct hundreds, and surviving evidence of its legal power in the sites and names of its places of execution. Gallows and gibbet names are found on our Ordnance maps, and there are many others, which are known locally, still attached
- ↑ Adams, Henry. ‘The Anglo-Saxon Courts of Law.’ ‘Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law,’ Boston, 1876, p. i.
