Free Battle of Hastings, The by Harriet Harvey Harriet; Wood Harvey Wood Page A

the defence of a kingdom united in
race and class. It throws into sad contrast the verdict of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1010, later in the reign of Æthelred, when the demoralization of the country had led to a situation in
which ‘no shire would any longer help its neighbour’.
    Because of the length of time that the Anglo-Saxon rule lasted, it was naturally not the same throughout, but there were, none the less, consistent threads running through the period. Thekingdoms that the seventh-century Ine and the tenth-century Athelstan ruled were indeed very different in many respects, but those over which Athelstan and Edward the
Confessor ruled were not in essence very dissimilar. The Domesday Book (1086), one of William’s most famous (and, it must be said, most valuable) achievements, aimed to take a snapshot
picture of England ‘on the day King Edward was alive and dead’, 5 January 1066; many of the institutions that it records as having existed then and that survived the conquest have been
shown to go far back in history, many of them to a time well before King Alfred or even King Ine. It has been surmised that some of the most important elements of them, for example the system of
hundreds, the local government units into which the shires were broken down for administrative and tax purposes, may well go back to a common Indo-European culture, for traces of it have been noted
in Carolingian France also. Many of them survived far into the future as well. The shire structure itself continued through the conquest unaltered and untampered with until 1974. A retiring prime
minister, resigning his parliamentary seat in the early years of the twenty-first century, still had to apply for the stewardship of the Chiltern hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham in
Buckinghamshire.
    The system of justice meant that wherever a man lived, he was rarely in a district so remote that he did not have access to a court of law: the king’s court, the shire court, the hundred
court. The involvement of the different ranks of the people in the different levels of the national administration of justice was also a unifying factor, and gave the public at large a voice in
national affairs that could never have been imagined in, say, Normandy during the reign of autocrats such as Duke William or his father. There were written law-codes in England from the time of
King Æthelberht of Kent in the sixth century, andthere are many hints between the times of Æthelberht and Edward the Confessor that not even the king could be
regarded as being above the law (not least the agreement between Æthelred and his people that he would be accepted back as king provided he ruled better). In considering why the Angevin kings
were to prove more effective legislators in England than in their homeland of Anjou, Patrick Wormald suggests that this could be because in the tenth and eleventh centuries, English kings had laid
down the law as no other western rulers did. xxii Henry II, he points out, made law like no other twelfth-century king because he inherited a system of
royal justice that was already uniquely well developed and active. There had never been any written law-code in Normandy. It has been said that
    the English kings, like the Carolingians but unlike most of the Carolingians’ successors, maintained a system of rule in which their contact, via public courts, with a
     fairly large number of free classes mattered for them, and for those classes. That those courts and classes survived the Conquest may well have done much to determine the later history of
     England. xxiii
    It has been estimated that in Anglo-Saxon England there were rarely more than two layers of lordship between the yeoman and his king. A situation in which King Alfred could give
judgement in a case while he was in his chamber washing his hands was recorded for posterity not because it was unusual but because it was habitual – one of the plaintiffs had appealed