I. the sovereigns and the nobility, for their chief support, CHAP. upon the tenantry of their estates. From the commencement of these contests, accordingly, the distinction between Norman and English disappeared; the ancient prejudices and pride of the former yielded to the stronger feeling of antipathy at their common enemies; English became the ordinary language both of the higher and lower orders, and the English institutions the object of veneration to the descendants of the very conquerors who had overturned them. The continual want of money, which the long duration of this desperate struggle occasioned to the crown, strengthened the growth of English freedom; each successive grant by the barons was accompanied by a confirmation of ancient rights; the commons, from the frequent use of arms, came to feel their own 1 Hume, ii. weight, and to assert their ancient privileges; and at 487, 488, length England, under the Plantagenet sovereigns, regained 78, 79. as much liberty as it had ever enjoyed under the rule of its Saxon monarchs.1 Three circumstances, connected with the Norman Conquest, contributed in a remarkable manner to the preservation of a free spirit among the barons and commons of England. 492; iii. 4, under the kings. I. The first of these was the great weight which the 26. crown acquired, from the ample share of the conquered Power of lands which were allotted to the sovereign at the Con- the crown quest. William received no less than fourteen hundred Norman and twenty-two manors for his proportion-a patrimony far greater than was enjoyed by any sovereign of Europe at the same period. The consequence was, that the turbulent spirit of the barons was far more effectually checked in this island than in the Continental states; the monarch could generally crush by his sentence any obnoxious nobleman; his courts of justice extended their jurisdiction into every part of the kingdom; and the essential prerogatives of the crown, those of coining money and repressing private wars, were never, except I. CHAP. in reigns of unusual weakness, usurped by the subjects. For a century and a half after the Conquest, the authority of the Norman sovereigns was incomparably more extensive than that of any of the other monarchs who had settled on the ruins of the Roman empire. The industry and wealth of the commons was thus more completely protected in England than in the neighbouring kingdoms, where feudal violence, private wars, and incessant 371; ii. 73, bloodshed, crushed the first efforts of laborious freedom; and the middle ranks, comparatively free from oppression, gradually grew in importance with the extension of their numbers, and the insensible increase of their opulence.1 Hume, i. 353, 369, 74. Hall. ii. 427. Lyttleton, ii. 288. 27. Insular situation. II. The second was the insular situation of the country, and its consequent exemption from the horrors of actual warfare. With the exception of a few incursions of the Scottish monarchs into the northern counties, which were transient in their duration and partial in their effects, England has hardly ever been the seat of foreign war since the Conquest; and the southern counties, by far the most important both in riches and population, have not seen the fires of an enemy's camp for eight hundred years. Securely cradled in the waves, her industry has scarcely ever felt the devastating influence of foreign conquest; her arms have often carried war into foreign states, but she has never suffered from its havoc in her own. Periods of foreign hostility have been known to her inhabitants only from the increased excitation of national feeling, or the quickened encouragement of domestic industry. The effects of this happy exemption from the devastation of foreign invasion have been incalculable. It is during the dangers and the exigencies of war that military violence acquires its fatal ascendency; that industry is blighted by the destruction of its produce; labour deadened by the forfeiture of its hopes; pacific virtues extinguished by the insults which they suffer; warlike qualities developed by the eminence to which they lead. In every age the principles of liberty I. expand during the protection of peace, and are withered CHAP. by the whirl and the agitation of war. If this truth has been experienced in our own times, when military devastation is comparatively limited, and industry universally diffused, what must have been its importance in a barbarous age, when the infant shoots of freedom were first beginning to appear, and could expand only under the shelter of baronial or monastic power? It is accordingly observed by all our historians, that the feudal institutions of England were far less military than those which obtained in the Continental monarchies; that private wars were comparatively unknown, and that the armies of the kings Hallam, i. were for the most part composed of levied troops, whose 479. unbroken experience soon acquired a decided superiority over the feudal militia of their enemies.1 28. Saxon in III. The third circumstance was the fortunate limitation of the privileges of nobility to the eldest son of the Anglofamily. This was owing to the weight of the commons stitutions. in the constitution, which arose from the number and opulence of the Saxon proprietors, who had been dispossessed by the Normans. It prevented the formation of a privileged class, and suffered the prerogatives of nobility to exist only in that member of the family who inherited the paternal estate; and there is no single circumstance which has contributed more to confer its long permanence, its regular improvement, and its inherent vigour, on the English constitution. The descendants of the nobles were thus prevented from forming a caste, to whom, as in the Continental monarchies, the exclusive right of filling certain situations might be limited. The younger branches of the aristocracy, after a few generations, relapsed into the rank, and became identified with the interests of the commons; and that pernicious separation of noble and plebeian, which has been the principal cause of the destruction of freedom in all the European states, was from the earliest times softened in this country. The nobility in the actual CHAP. possession of their estates were too few in number I. to form an obnoxious body; their relations, possessing no privileges above the commoners, ceased, after a few generations, either to be objects of envy to their inferiors, or to be identified in interest with the class from which they sprang. Thus the different ranks of society were blended together, by a link descending from the higher, and ultimately resting on the lower orders.1 1 Hallam, i 478. But this freedom, though firmly established by the Entire want feudal constitutions, was limited to the classes for whose 29. of protec rural tion to the interest alone these constitutions appear to have been labourers. intended. The villains or slaves, who still constituted the great body of the labouring population, were almost wholly unprotected. Even in Magna Charta, while the personal freedom of every free subject was provided for, the more numerous body of slaves-that is, the whole rural labourers, probably nine-tenths of the working classes in the kingdom-were left to the mercy of their landlords, with the single stipulation that they should not be deprived of their implements of husbandry. Their * Hume, ii. emancipation, far from being the work of the barons, 305. Hall. Was accomplished by the efforts of the clergy and the progress of humanity in a subsequent age. General liberty, in our sense of the word, was unknown in England till after the Great Rebellion. 2 83; iii. 301, i. 447. Tytler, ii. 260. 30. spirit in the Richard II. In the reign of Richard II., the gradual progress of Democratic wealth, and the extraordinary excitation awakened time of among all ranks by the military glories and lucrative wars of Edward III., produced the first effervescence of the real democratic spirit. The insurrection of Wat Tyler, which was contemporaneous with the efforts of the Flemish burghers to emancipate their country from feudal tyranny, was a general movement of the lower classes; and, accordingly, it was directed not against the power of the crown, but against the exclusive privileges of the nobility. "When Adam delved and Eve span, I. was the maxim on which they rested; a distich point- CHAP. ing to a struggle of a totally different kind from any previously known in modern Europe, and corresponding very nearly to the principles which, four centuries after, produced the French Revolution. But all the great changes of nature are gradual in their progress: the effects of sudden convulsions are as transient as the effervescence from which they spring. The insurrection of the peasants in England met with the same fate as did that of the Flemish democracy at Resebecque: the feudal array of the barons easily dispersed a rabble imperfectly armed and wholly undisciplined. Their victory was fortunate for the progress of real liberty; the triumph of the peasants must have been shortlived, and would have exhibited the horrors of a Negro revolt. Ignorant, disunited men, drawn from humble employments, unaccustomed to the exercise of political rights, can never long remain at the head of affairs. After the fervour of the moment is over, they necessarily fall under the dominion, if not of their former masters, at least of tyrants of their own creating, and their ultimate condition is worse than the first. Centuries of peace and increasing wealth-the unceasing operation of a beneficent religion - the influence of printing and diffused knowledge-a more general distribution of pro- 1 Barante, i. perty a change in the implements of human destruc- 74. Pref. tion, were all required, before a part, even, of the levelling 10, 11. principles then diffused among the English peasantry could be safely carried into practice.1 Hume, iii. Roses. The power of the feudal aristocracy received a final blow 31. from the wars of York and Lancaster. Those bloody Wars of the dissensions destroyed the fabric of Gothic power: they watered the English plains with blood, but it was blood from which has arisen a harvest of glory. From causes which it is difficult now to trace, they early assumed a character of extraordinary ferocity. Prisoners even of the highest rank, on both sides, were, from the very com |