CHAP. IV. Y The Witena-Gemot, or ANGLO-Saxon Parliament, and of whom composed. IV. The gemot of the witan was the great council of CHAP. the Anglo-Saxon nation; their parliament, or legislative and supreme judicial assembly. As the highest judicial court of the kingdom, it resembled our present House of Lords. And in those periods, when the peers of the realm represented territorial property rather than hereditary dignities, the comparison between the Saxon witena-gemot and the upper house of our modern parliament might have been more correctly made in their legislative capacity. As the German states are recorded by Tacitus to have had national councils', so the continental Saxons are also stated to have possessed them. If we had no other evidence of the political wisdom of our Gothic or Teutonic ancestors than their institution of the witena-gemots, or national parliaments, this happy and wise invention would be sufficient to entitle them to our veneration and gratitude. For they have not only given to government a form, energy, and direction more promotive of the happiness of mankind than any other species of it has exhibited, but they are the most admirable provision for adapting its exercise and continuance to all the new circumstances ever 2 | Tacitus de Morib. Germ. N VIII. BOOK arising of society, and for suiting and favouring its continual progress. Of these assemblies, originating amid the woods and migrations of the Teutonic tribes, one important use has been, to remove from the nation that has possessed and preserved them, the reproach, the bondage, and the misery of an immutable legislation. The Medes and Persians made it their right that their laws should never be changed; not even to be improved. This truly barbaric conception, a favourite dogma also with the kingly priests, or priestly kings of the Nile, and even at Lacedemon, could only operate to curtail society of its fair growth, and to bind all future ages to be as imperfect as the past. It may produce such a political and intellectual monstrosity as Egypt long exhibíted, and force a nation to remain a piece of mechanism of bygone absurdity. But internal degradation and discomfort, external weakness, and national inferiority and decay, are the certain accompaniments of a polity so violent and unnatural. INSTEAD of thus making the times of ignorance, national infancy, and incipient experience the standard and the laws of a country's future manhood, the Anglo-Saxon witena-gemot or parliament was a wise and parental lawgiver; not bound in the chains of an obsolete antiquity, but always presiding with a nurturing care; always living, feeling, and acting with the population and cir. cumstances of the day, and providing such regulations, either by alterations of former laws, or by the additions of new ones, as the vicissitudes, novelties, wants, improvement, sentiment, situation, and interest of its co-existing society, in its various . IV. a classes, were found to be continually needing: CHAP. sometimes legislating for the benefit of the rich, or the great, or the clergy, or the commercial, or the agriculturist ; sometimes for the middling and lower orders; and sometimes collectively for all. Open to petitions, stating the grievances from which certain classes or individuals occasionally suffer, and acquiring thus a knowledge of the wants and feelings of society, which no vigilance of its own or of government could by other means ob. tain : ready to enact new laws, as manifest evils suggest and reasoning wisdom patronises, an English parliament, with all its imperfections, many perhaps inevitable, is, - I speak with reverence, and only use the expression from the want of another, as meaning, - the nearest human imitation of a superintending Providence which our necessities or our sagacity have yet produced or devised. The right of petitioning brings before it all the evils, real or imaginary, that affect the population which it guards; and the popular part being newchosen at reasonable intervals, from the most edu. cated orders of society, is perpetually renewed with its best talents; and, what is not less valuable, with its living and contemporaneous feelings, fears, hopes, and tendencies. No despotic government, however pure and wise, can have these advantages. . It cannot so effectually know what its subjects want. It cannot so well judge what they ought to obtain. It cannot so completely harmonise with the sympathies and flowing mind of the day, because its majesty precludes the acquisition of such identity as a septennial or hexennial election infuses. Whether new members are chosen, or old ones are re-elected, in both cases the election VIII. BOOK bespeaks their affinity with the hearts and under standings that surround them, and provides this security for a kind, vigilant, and improved legislation more effectually than any other system has yet im- . parted. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had all these advantages, though the peculiar state of their society prevented them from having that full benefit of such a noble institution as we now enjoy. But they were petitioned, and they legislated; and the dom-boc, or laws, of every Anglo-Saxon reign that has survived to us contains some improvements on the preceding. Some of their members were also most probably chosen like our own august parliament. The noble tree was then planted and growing, and had begun to produce fruit; though it had not obtained the majestic strength and dilation, and the beauty and fertility of that which now overshadows, protects, and distinguishes the British islands and their dependencies. But this excellence our Anglo-Saxon parliaments certainly possessed, that they contained the collected feelings and mind of all the classes of the nation, except of the enslaved. The king was always an integral part of their constitution. He summoned, he addressed them ; his concurrence was always necessary to their legislation, and he was the organ of its execution. The noble proprietors of land, and of the dignities annexed to it or flowing from it, were also essential members, and sometimes the most powerful. The gentry or thegns, knights, and the official dignities were there, and the chiefs of the clergy who had landed property. The bishops and abbots were always a constituent part, after Christianity was introduced ; and if that unhappy portion of the people, which СНАР. IV. consisted of the slaves of all these orders, had no actual representatives, yet the many provisions for their benefit in the laws show that they possessed humane friends in it, attentive to their interests, and compassionating their degradation : these were probably the king and the clergy. It was the interest of royalty, and congenial with the courteous feelings which have usually accompanied our kings, to increase the number of the free ; because every freed slave gave the crown a new partisan, and thus lessened those of a fierce, haughty, and dangerous nobility. It was the duty and the benevolent wish of the religious, and also their interest, to pursue the same policy, and, in the mean time, to mitigate the evils of thraldom. Thus the feel. ings, the interests, and the reason of all classes of the Anglo-Saxon society appeared in their witena. gemot; and whoever studies the successive provisions of their legislation which have come down to us, will perceive that the state of every class was progressively meliorated by new laws as new circumstances required them ; and, even as far as we can discern their operation, almost every law seems to have been an improvement. Nothing more tended to insure this effect, than the right and practice of the subject to petition his legislature; for this, in practical tendency, makes every man, who has any grievance to complain of, a kind of party to its councils, as it enables him to lay his complaint before it, as completely as if he were a member of its body. Thus as our present parlialiament, in its sovereign, its nobles, and its popular representatives, and in the petitions which it receives, concentres all the feelings and mind of the nation ; so did the Anglo-Saxon witena-gemot ; for |