62 History of the English Landed Interest. 



Any intercliange of commodities betwixt village and village^ 

 was unusual, and, as we shall shortly see by reference to the 

 Saxon Chronicle, constantly recurring famines and pestilences 

 were a necessary result. Well may we believe that as agricul- 

 turalists the conquerors might with advantage have become 

 the pupils of their slaves. The fields which year by year had 

 borne harvests sufficiently abundant to support the Roman 

 garrisons in Gaul, even in addition to native requirements, 

 now often failed to maintain their own cultivators. The 

 export trade in corn ceased entirely, and even its circulation 

 in the interior of the country had. stagnated to a degree little 

 short of actual cessation. 



Bad agriculturalist though he was, the Anglo-Saxon's hunger 

 for land was only equalled by his craving for maritime adven- 

 ture. Its possession, as we have already said, was the basis 

 of all his social distinctions, and this fact is the more significant 

 since it was a time when personal property was immeasurably 

 of more value than real. Do we not detect these same charac- 

 teristics every time a modern tradesman invests his small 

 fortune in a freehold or in farming stock, and breeds a lad as 

 keen for salt water as ever had been his Bersaker forefather? 

 Lucky too for the tradesman, that that same forefather had 

 never quite succeeded in stamping out the Roman sj^stems of 

 municipal government, or he had not been able to accumulate 

 the capital out of trade which enabled him to purchase a 

 restful and lucrative old age in the country. 



The picture of social life which next presents itself is a king 

 presiding over his "Witangemote, and the thanes wielding 

 almost identical powers over the vassals and agricultural 

 classes on their lands. The three great ranks in the kingdom, 

 the nobles, the free, and the slaves, each contributing its 

 allotted services to the general welfare of the nation, and each 

 possessing its own peculiar social distinctions, had become 

 further subdivided into six separate grades. The aristocracy 

 were divided into king's thanes and lesser thanes, the former 



> It must be borne in mind that for tlie greater part of the Anglo-Saxon 

 era there were trackless wastes separating village and village, probably 

 infested by outlaws and wolves. 



