tections in the sensation novels, when the machinations of the villain hero are exposed one by one. But this romance of archæology was not yet concluded. In one of the old monasteries of Scotland a narrative of the affair was preserved which flatly contradicted what had been written on the erasure, and might be presumed to harmonise with the passage erased.

The occasion of Allen's championship was the rise of a new giant on the other side of a very strange and peculiar aspect, bringing with him weapons of a grotesque and thoroughly original make. This was Sir Francis Palgrave. Whatever defects he had, he was a man of deep archæological reading, whose mind was crammed with an enormous store of feudal facts. He had not the art of sorting his stock very well, but it was known to be vast in bulk, with much of it of a costly and precious kind. His archæological wealth gave him power, which he used, like many other potentates, rather capriciously. Among his other despotic freaks, he would have it that Britain had become an empire like Rome; that the Saxon King of England was the Emperor or Basileus; and that the King of Scotland was a sub-regulus-a sort of proconsul or legate ruling a province, just as the province of Britain might have been ruled in the days of Domitian.

There did not seem to be much harm in this. It could not greatly humiliate Scotland, even were it true that at that early day, long before the tyrannous feudalism of the Norman had been established, there had been a union under one head of all the states and races in Britain-say for protection from the inroads of the Northmen. As the whole affair was a theory, a little manipulation of phraseology might bring it to suit every taste. Instead of an empire on the model of Rome, it might be called a confederation of states, with a presi

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dent-a sort of prototype of the American Union. But the thing ceased to be a joke when by a legitimate logical sequence it was shown that Wallace was quite justly disembowelled, hanged, drawn, and quartered, because he did not seem to see it. Wallace should have known better, and applied the old maxim of the feudalists, Vinco vincentem, vinco te; and it was all the worse for him, poor fellow, that he overlooked that sage maxim! Harold the Saxon King of England was conquered by William of Normandy. William no doubt would have conquered Scotland if he could, but he had already enough on his hands. But by feudal usage conquest was not necessary. was one of the old latent rights of the Saxon Crown that it had imperial authority over Scotland; and by gaining the Crown of England, William the Conqueror gained that latent right, and transmitted it to posterity. Napoleon would have carried this a step further. William of Normandy was the vassal of the King of France, and his conquest should have gone to the aggrandisement of the French Emperor. "Britain is just an island off the French coast, and naturally belongs to France," was a saying of his which forms one of the best caricatures on theories about national rights that cannot be enforced. However, as he said, the sovereign power of France had been enforced before, and might be enforced again. He unrolled and exposed to the admiring gaze of the people the celebrated Bayeux Tapestry, which gives in so strange and vivid a manner the whole epos of the preparations, the embarkation, the landing, and the final result. That he was to follow the precedent, he made clear by his armament at Boulogne.

Sir Francis is a writer whose meaning it is often hard to get at, and this peculiarity has greatly limited the number of those who have become acquainted with his

opinions on this and on many other points. But he has an interpreter and disciple in Mr Freeman, to whom the same defect is not imputable. His propositions are as clear as the English language admits of their being made. Perhaps the example of his master has driven him to something like the opposite extreme. The contem

plation of that grotesque literary giant floundering hopelessly in the mazes of labyrinthine sentences, or stumbling over jagged technicalities, seems to have influenced Mr Freeman somewhat as the exhibitions of debauched Helots influenced the Spartan youth. There is occasionally something almost unpleasant in the perfectness of his preparation to prevent your misunderstanding him, so much does it seem to found on the reader's incapacity to take a hint. The consequence is, that what was dubiously looming through the mist is now clear as daylight, and can be fairly examined. To make the story of the subordination to the British Empire complete and intelligible, it was necessary to tell how the subordination had been accomplished. Mr Freeman sees it, and tells it with clear simplicity. It was a case of "commendation." The King of Scots and his people commended" to the King of Wessex. But let him tell his own story. He is speaking of the reign of Eadward," commonly known as Edward the Elder, who died in the year 925 :

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"Eadward now became, what no WestSaxon king had been before him, immediate sovereign of all England south of the Humber. Having thus extended his immediate dominion beyond all precedent, he was able to extend his more general supremacy equally beyond anything possessed by his predecessors. The princes of Wales, Northumberland, Strathclyde, and Scotland, all submitted to him by a voluntary act; they chose him to father and to lord.' No hostilities with either Strathclyde or Scotland are spoken of; the act of submission appears to have been made by the free

consent of the rulers and people of those countries. The motive to such an act is doubtless to be found in a dread of Eadward's power, combined with a sense of the necessity of his position as the geneScotland and Strathclyde had suffered ral champion of Britain against the Danes.

as much from Scandinavian invasions as

England had. To choose the West-Saxon king as their overlord might involve some national humiliation, but it was tendom as a suzerain than to be exposed better to receive the champion of Chris

without defence to the incursions of the heathen. Eadward thus obtained a far greater extent of dominion than had been held by Ecgberht himself. Ecgberht's immediate kingdom stopped at the Thames, and his overlordship reached only to the Forth. Eadward's immediate kingdom reached to the Humber, and his overlordship extended over the whole island. In receiving the submission of Wales and Northumberland he did but win back what his father had lost; but the submission of Scotland and Strathclyde was something wholly new. The Scots had recognised a precarious superhaps a supremacy more precarious premacy in the old Northumbrian kings, still in the great Frankish emperor. But their submission to Wessex was wholly new; they had bowed to an overlord at York, but those days were long past, and they had never before bowed to an overlord at Winchester. This commendation of Scotland to the West-Saxon king is an event so important for the history of the next four hundred years, and it is an event which is often so com

pletely misunderstood, that I must re

serve some consideration of its exact enough to say here that, from this time bearing for my next chapter. It is to the fourteenth century, the vassalage of Scotland was an essential part of the public law of the Isle of Britain. No doubt many attempts were made to cast off the dependent relation which had been voluntarily incurred; but when a king of the English had once been chosen 'to father and to lord,' his successors never willingly gave up the position which had thus been conferred upon them. Whenever the King of the English is strong enough, he always appears as the acknowledged feudal superior of the King of Scots. Kenneth acts the part of a faithful vassal to Eadgar. Eadward the Confessor, like his nobler namesakes before and after, acts as suporior lord, and, as such, transfers the tributary crown from a usurper to the lawful heir. When the Norman Wil

liam had subdued England, he claimed and received the homage of Scotland as one of the undoubted rights of the crown which he had won. And nothing is clearer than that this homage was paid, not only for Cumberland or Lothian, but for the true kingdom of the Celtic Picts and Scots. In the days of Eadward and Æthelstan, Lothian was still English or Danish, an integral part of the kingdom of Northumberland, and the submission of Strathclyde was the separate act of another perfectly independent prince. The facts are undoubted; they are plain matters of history, which ought never to be looked at through the medium of provincial prejudice. The vassalage of Scotland to England is as certain as the earlier vassalage of Mercia to Wessex; but, for the last hundred and sixty years, the two facts have been of exactly the same practical importance."

The result of the "reserved consideration" is given forth in the following:

"The fact that the West-Saxon or English kings, from Eadward the Elder onwards, did exercise an external supremacy over the Celtic princes of the island is a fact too clear to be misunderstood by any one who looks the evidence on the matter fairly in the face. I date this supremacy, in the case of Scotland, from the reign of Eadward the Elder, because there is no certain earlier instance of submission on the part of the Scots to any West-Saxon king. I pass by the instances of Scottish submission to several of the earlier Northumbrian kings, as well as what looks very like a submission of both Scots and Northumbrians to the Roman Empire itself in the person of Charles the Great. These instances do not prove the existence of any permånent superiority; they are rather analogous to the temporary and fluctuating superiority of this or that Bretwalda over the other English kingdoms. But, from the time of Eadward the Elder onwards, the case is perfectly clear. The submission of Wales dates from the time of Ecgberht; but it evidently received a more distinct and formal acknowledgment in the reign of Eadward.

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share in the acts of their princes by which Eadward was chosen to father and to lord. I conceive this to mean that the Scottish and Welsh princes acted in this matter by the consent and authority of whatever body in their own states answered to the Witan in England. The commendation in both cases was a solemn national act. For the motive of the act I have already suggested a sufficient reason in fear of Eadward's power, combined with a sense of the necessity of common action with him against the heathen invaders who ravaged all parts of Britain alike. I use the feudal word commendation, because that word seems to me better than any other to express the real state of the case. The transaction between Eadward and the Celtic princes was simply an application, on an international scale, of the general principle of the comitatus. That relation, like all the feudal relations which it helped to form, may be contracted either on the greatest or on the smallest scale possible. The land which either is originally granted out on a military tenure, or which its allodial owner finds it expedient to convert into a fief so held, may be a kingdom or it may be a rood of land maintaining its man. So the lord whom a man chooses, and the man who chooses the lord, may be of any possible rank, from the Emperor and the Pope with their vassal kings, down to the smallest Thegn and his neighbouring Ceorl. The relation is exactly the same, whatever may be the rank and power of the parties between whom it is contracted. In every case alike, faithful service is owing on the one side and faithful protection on the other. Equally in the greatest case and in the smallest, the relation may imply a strictly feudal tenure of land or it may not. Now, in recording these cases of Welsh and Scottish submission, it will be observed that the Chronicles, as if of set purpose, make use of the familiar legal phrases which express the relation of commendation on the smaller scale. A man 'chose his lord;' he sought some one more powerful than himself, with whom he entered into the relation of comitatus; as feudal ideas strengthened, he commonly surrendered his allodial land to the lord so chosen, and received it back again from him on a feudal tenure. This was the process of commendation, a process of everyday occurrence in the case of private men choosing their lords, whether those lords were simple gentlemen or kings. And the process was equally familiar among sovereign princes them

selves. Almost all the northern and eastern vassals of the Western Empire, some of them of kingly rank, became vassals by commendation. The commendation was doubtless in many cases far from voluntary, but the legal form was always the same. The lands of these princes were not original grants from the Emperors; but their owners found it expedient to come to terms with their imperial neighbour, and to place themselves and their lands in the same position as if their lands had been real imperial grants. We might go on to say that the Norman conquerors of Southern Italy commended themselves to the Pope whom they took prisoner, and that the Sicilian kingdoms, on the strength of that commendation, remained for seven hundred years in the position of fiefs of the Holy See. The kingdom of England was certainly once, possibly twice, commended to a foreign potentate. John, as all the world knows, commended his kingdom to the Pope; and it is by no means clear that his brother Richard had not before that commended it to the Emperor. There was nothing unusual or degrading in the relation; if Scotland, Wales, Strathclyde, commended themselves to the West-Saxon king, they only put themselves in the same relation to their powerful neighbour in which every Continental prince stood in theory, and most of them in actual fact, to the Emperor, Lord of the World. Not to speak of a crowd of smaller instances, Odo, King of the West-Franks, commended himself to Arnulf of Germany, just as Howel and Constantine commended themselves to Eadward of Wessex. And this commendation was made before Arnulf became Emperor and Lord of the World, while he was still the simple King of the Eastern Franks. The commendation in the case of Scotland and Strathclyde was, in form at least, a perfectly voluntary act, done with the full consent of the nations interested. The kingdom of Strathclyde soon came to an end, and with the Welsh of Wales proper no permanent relations of any kind could be kept up. But between the English

overlord and his Scottish vassal the mutual compact was perhaps as well kept as it ever was in such cases. It was occasionally broken and occasionally renewed; but this was no more than hap pened always and everywhere in those turbulent times. The relations between

the English Basileus and the King of Scots may on the whole be called friend

ly; they were at least much more friendly than the relations which existed between the King of the West-Franks and his dangerous vassal at Rouen. The original commendation to the Eadward of the tenth century, confirmed by a series of acts of submission spread over the whole of the intermediate time, is the true justification for the acts of his glorious namesake in the thirteenth century. The only difference was that, during that time, feudal notions had greatly developed on both sides; the original commendation of the Scottish king and people to a lord, had changed, in the ideas of both sides, into a feudal tenure of the land of the Scottish kingdom. But this change was simply the universal change which had come over all such relations everywhere. That this point, the only point which could with any justice have been raised against Edward Plantagenet on the Scottish side, never was brought forward, shows how completely the ancient notion of commendation had gone out of mind. But the principal point at issue, the right of the overlord to decide between two claimants of the vassal kingdom, rested on excellent precedents in the reigns of Eadward the Confessor and of William Rufus. Altogether the vassalage--to use the most convenient word-of Scotland from the commendation to Eadward to the Treaty of Northampton is one of the best authenticated facts in history. But it is here needful to point out two other distinct events which have often been confounded with the commendation of Scotland, a confusion through which the real state of the case has often been misunderstood.'

if there were only any authority This is a pretty enough theory, for it. It is all along of that little line in the Saxon Chronicle which tells how simultaneously all the tribes in Britain-the Scots, the the Northumbrians, and the fierce Welsh, the Strathclyde Britons, Danish invaders-chose King Edward for their father and lord, their "fæther and hlaforde." haps hardly a text in Scripture into wide conclusions than this. We has been more amply spread out have frequently to meet with such unaccountable events in chronicles, and to pass them over with a shrug

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of unsatisfied curiosity. What is meant by father and lord so used, no one can distinctly tell; but we can easily say that nothing could more contradict the ordinary tenor of history, than that the inhabitants of Scotland should spontaneously submit to such authority as England afterwards claimed over them. It is only some twelve years after that there is a great invasion of England by a Scots army, and a pitched battle fought at Brunenburgh, near Durham, in which England gained a victory, along with relief from great peril. Some of the Indian tribes call the President of the United States their "Father." When they wish to be complimentary to English travellers, they have been known to apply the title to the Sovereign of Britain. On a late occasion of drinking" our great father" in fire-water, the traveller reminded his host that the Sovereign of Britain was a queen, on which he transferred his toast our great mother." His guest to " said he felt uncertain whether there was or was not an undercurrent of jocularity in this ; and there is something of the comical in the idea of those ferocious tribes, who were the terror of England, spontaneously choosing the king of that country as their father and lord.

Another passage in the Saxon Chronicle tells how the Conqueror attacked Scotland by sea and land, and how King Malcolm came to him and gave hostages, and became his man. For all that this may have been worth, the Chronicle says that the Conqueror's army went back, having "found naught for which they were the better." Commenting on this, Sir Francis Palgrave says that "Malcolm's determination of submitting to William was received by the clans with the greatest joy-as a boon, not a humiliation.' If we could

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get this on the authority of "the clans" themselves, we might at the same time get them to reconcile their conduct with the ferocious invasion in which they afterwards followed Malcolm into England.

A word with Mr Freeman about this" Commendation" of his. We do not remember that Palgrave says much about this feudal usage. In his posthumous work there is the passage following:

orders of the times, there existed throughAmong all the convulsions and disout France an anxious yearning for the preservation of organic unity. Borrowing from our neighbours an incongruous expression, which, like many contradictions in terms, performs a duty refused by the rigid orthodoxy of linguistic accuracy, the Civil Hierarchy was deficient nity were vaguely applied or assumed, in systematic regularity. Titles of dignor was there any settled scheme of graduated subjection; yet it was held as a normal principle, that no individual ought to live at large among the people, with the head of the state, whether imbut that he should be connected upwards mediately, or through some link or links of dependence.

"Under the influence of this prevail. ing opinion, allodial lands-that is to say, lands destitute of an overlord-were considered as blemishes in the common

wealth. There was no absolute law

compelling an allodial proprietor to "commend" himself to a senior. No direct blaine could be imputed to him; yet he was tilting against public opinion. Though not positively stigmatised as a disturber of the body politic, he nevertheless offended against its proprieties. For the effect which this usage had in perfecting the feudal scheme, I must refer to that venerated teacher

who first pointed out distinctly the importance of the custom as a most influ ential element in medieval policy. It is

sufficient to observe that commendation' did not at this period necessarily imply the formal surrender of the soil the demand was satisfied by the simple from the allodialist to the superior, but acceptance of a lord as a protector, under whom the proprietor could range himself in the social community."+