CHAP. XI. to do with it. Alfred was very humane and charitable; his greatest distress, a mendicant asked relief, he shared his last loaf with him. and when, in But I must bring my remarks on this great man to a close. He died at the early age of fifty-three, on the 26th of October, A.D. 901, having reigned a little short of thirty years. In spite of the risk of censure for wandering from my main subject, I cannot forbear embellishing my work with Sir James Mackintosh's finely written character of him : "In any age or country such a Prince would be a prodigy. Perhaps there is no example of any man who so happily combined the magnanimous with the mild virtues, who joined so much energy in war with so remarkable cultivation of the useful and beautiful arts of peace, and whose versatile faculties were so happily inserted in their due place and measure as to support and secure each other and give solidity to the strength of the whole character. That such a miracle should occur in a barbarous age and nation, that study should be thus pursued in the midst of civil and foreign wars, by a monarch who suffered almost incessantly from painful maladies, and that it so little encroached on the duties of government as to leave him for ages the popular model for exact and watchful justice, --are facts of so extraordinary a nature that they may well excuse those who have suspected that there are some exaggeration and suppression in the narrative of his reign. Even the Norman historians, who seem to have had his diaries and note books in their hands, choose him as the glory of the land which was become their own. The bright image may long be held up before the national mind. The selection of Alfred by the English people as the founder of all that was dear to them is surely the strongest proof of the deep impression left on the minds of all of his transcendant wisdom and virtue." It is somewhat remarkable that Lord Macaulay, though in the brief introduction to his History of England he finds time to question the existence of King Arthur (as Milton did before him), yet makes no allusion to King Alfred. CHAPTER XII. THE CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL DIVISION OF KENT. IN N the course of this work I have, though with diffidence, ventured to express my opinion on several important but doubtful questions. I am now about to refer to another that I have not seen discussed, and which therefore still remains in obscurity. In doing so, I must request the reader to keep in view that it is the civil and ecclesiastical divisions of Kent, and not of England, that I here propose to treat of. It is to be regretted that in our seminaries, and especially in our National schools, instruction on the topography of the county and district in which the children reside, is too often lost sight of, and left to be picked up in riper years. The adult may, or may not, be able to say that his county is divided into East and West (and of late, Mid) Kent; and that these divisions are subdivided into Lathes and Hundreds; but where is the boy in Kent who could tell you in what respect the division of his own county differs from that of the adjoining ones? Were you to ask him to which civil and ecclesiastical division even his own parish belonged, could he answer you correctly? You may find that he possesses some crude notion that Alfred the Great (whom he has been taught to look upon as the founder of everything that is good) was the originator of all these divisions, and he does not trouble himself any more about it. Ought this to be? CHAP. XII. CHAP. XII. Saxons p. 73. The late Mr. Kemble, in the chapter following that on "The Mark," has written another learned one on the Gá or Scir. He candidly admits that its origin must be referred to a period far anterior to any historical record. He describes the Gá as "The union of two, three, or more marks in a federal bond for purposes of a religious, judicial, or even political character. The technical name for such a union is in Germany a Gau or Bant; in England the ancient name Gá has been almost universally superseded by that of scir or shire. For the most part the natural divisions of the county are the Divisions of the Gá, and the size of this depends on such accidental limits as well as upon the character and dispositions of the several collective bodies which we have called marks." After telling us that the Gá itself was the original kingdom, he proceeds :- "As the mark contained within itself the means of doing right between. man and man, i. e., its Markmót; as it had its principal officer or judge, and beyond a doubt its priest and place of religious observances, so the County, Scir, or Gá had all these on a larger and more imposing scale; and thus it was enabled to do right between mark and mark, as well as between man and man, and to decide those differences the arrangement of which transcended the powers of the smaller body. If the elders and leaders of the Mark could settle the mode of conducting the internal affairs of their district, so the elders and leaders of the Gá (the same leading markmen in a corporate capacity), could decide upon the weightier causes that affected the whole community; and thus the scírgemót or shiremoot was the completion of a system of which the Mearcmót was the foundation." In carrying out his theory and applying it to such districts as the Andred Forest, he explains that if land existed like the Weald, and not included within the limits of some mark, we may infer that it became the public property of the Gá, i. e., of all the marks in their corporate capacity. He arrives at this conclusion, however, because a right over these waste lands was exercised at a later period by the King and other constituted authorities. To me, Mr. Kemble's remarks on the Gá as applicable to England are not more convincing than his observations. on the Mark. I conceive that he has drawn in both cases too largely on his imagination, and has viewed things too exclusively through a German medium. We certainly have no documentary evidence as to when shires or counties took the place of the kingdoms which had composed the Octarchy. Everything is doubtful connected with it; though many circumstances concur to show it was not a simultaneous act. Indeed the inferences all point to a contrary conclusion. The subject is too important to be passed over hastily, and the reader shall be furnished with the best ancient and modern opinions which I can collect. I will adopt here the course I have already pursued when considering other controversial points, and will refer first to some of the authors who attribute to Alfred's master-mind the division of England into shires, and afterwards quote those who dissent from this view. The present county of Kent, as we shall find from nearly all the historians, constituted the kingdom of Kent, with some immaterial variation in the southern boundary abutting to the Limen or Rother, which we will notice hereafter. The neighbouring districts of Sussex and Surrey were included in the South Saxon Kingdom, while Middlesex and Essex were included in the East Saxon. England, while the Heptarchy remained entire, was not divided into counties, but, says Camden, "into certain small regions with their hides, which, out of an old fragment which I had of Francis Tate, a gentleman most conversant in the antiquity of our law, I have here put down. But it containeth that country only which lieth on this side Humber." In this list Cant-warena is meutioned, and represented as containing 15,000 hides.† Lambarde, who writes with great caution on the subject, says that from the continued contentions which existed during the Heptarchy, and the constant struggle of the Saxon kings to enlarge their borders, no certain limits to their kingdoms can be defined. "Yet (he *Sir Henry Spelman and Mr. Kemble also refer to this document. I have already noticed the uncertainty attached to the meaning of this word. The quantity of land included in a hide varied, it is supposed, in different districts. CHAP. XII. p. 158., Holland's Ed. CHAP. XII. says) we will go as near the truth as we can, and follow the best approved authors that have written thereon;" and then, in speaking of the Kentish kingdom, he observes that "it had for the most part the same bounds that the shire of Kent yet holdeth, although at sometime, and by the prowess of some king, it was extended much further.” Beginning of A.D. 892. P. 153. He subsequently describes Baldred as the last of the Kentish kings, and proceeds: "When Kent was united by King Egbert (who last of all changed the name of the people, and called them Englishmen) unto the West Saxon kingdom, which in the end became lady and mistress of all the rest of the kingdoms also; and it was from thenceforth wholly governed after the West Saxon law, until such time as King Alfred first divided the whole realm into particular shires, upon this occasion following: "The Danes, both in his time and before, had flocked by sea to the coasts of this land in great numbers, sometimes wasting and spoiling with sword and fire, wheresoever they might arrive; and sometimes taking with them great booties to their ships without doing any further harm: which thing (continuing for many years together) caused the husbandmen to abandon their tillage, and gave occasion and hardiness to evil-disposed persons to fall to the like pillage and robbery; the which, the better to cloke their mischief withal, feigned sometimes to be Danish pirates, and would sometime come on land in one part, and sometime in another, driving great spoils, as the Danes had done, to their ships before them. "The good King Alfred therefore, that had marvellously travailed in repulsing the barbarous Danes, espying this outrage, and thinking it no less the part of a politic prince to root out the noisome subject than to hold out the foreign enemy, by advice of his council, and by the example of Moses (which followed the counsel of Jethro, his father-in-law) divided the whole realm into certain parts, or sections (being two and thirty in number, as I guess), which of the Saxon word 'Scyran,' signifying to cut, he termed shires, or (as we yet speak) shares and portions; and appointed over every one shire an earl, or alderman (or both), to whom he committed the government and rule of the same." Camden, following Lambarde (of whom he speaks in the highest commendation) says: "When Alfred was sole monarch, like as the Germans our ancestors, as Tacitus witnesseth, he kept courts and ministered justice in every Territory and town, and had a hundred men out of the common people as companions and assistants to perform this function: even so, to use the words of Ingulfus of Crowland, he first divided England into counties, for that the natural inhabitants after the example, and under colour of the Danes, committed outrages and robberies." Dr. Harris, also, gives all the merit of dividing England |