82 TRANSACTION'S. igor-2 



was a time when every freeman of England could raise his voice or clash his weapon ii> 

 the assembly which chose bishops and enrldormen and King~ ; when he could boast th. t 

 the laws which he obeyed were laws of his own making, and that the men who bore 

 rule over him were rulers sf his own choosirg. 



And Kemble (i) declares that : 



Whether the assembly of theWitan making laws is considered to represent in 

 our modern form an assembly of the v/hole people, it is clear that the power of self- 

 government is recognized in the latter. 



We have well authenticated instances of the deposition 

 6i Kings by the Witenagemot, numbering amongst them 

 Ethelwald and Alcred, in Northumbria, and Sigebert, Ethel- 

 red II and Harthacnut in Wessex (2). As to the people's 

 right of electing the King, I shall speak a little later on. 



However, under the absolutism of the Normans we can- 

 not expect to hear much of the theory, still less of the prac- 

 tice of popular sovereignty as conceived in the polity of the 

 Anglo-Saxons. The popular assembly of the former gave 

 way to the Curia Regis^ in its early stages at least a mere 

 court of the King's feudal vassals, who, as might be expected, 

 pandered to his despotism ; and thus was the progress of the 

 liberty of the subject retarded for nearly two hundred years. 

 It was not until the effectual blending of the Franco-Norman 

 with the Anglo-Saxon stock that the blossom of Magna Charta 

 appeared on the tree of British freedom, a magnificent promise 

 of the full fruitage of popular government with which the 

 Empire fearlessly confronts the issues of the new century. 



The late Dr. Rudolph Gneist (3), next to Bisliop Stubbs 

 the most acute explorer of the Constitutional history of Eng- 

 land, says : 



The Norman government of the Kingdom rested upon a combination of the 

 relations of the military, judicial, police, financial and ecclesiastical authority, con 

 sequently its central point was found in the person of the King. 



Thus with the advent of the Conqueror, as Professor 

 Edmund Robertson, in his monograph on ' Government ' in 

 the Encyclopcsdia Britannica^ so well puts it, "Every ancient 



(1) Saxons, ii, 239,240. 



(2) Cf. Taswell-Langmead's Eriq Cons, Hift. cap I. 



(3) Const His, Eng. I, cap. 16. 



