more recent times, the great resident squire of the neighbourhood, exercising his power and influence over it according to the manners and customs of his day.
With some knowledge of Anglo-Saxon life in the middle of the eleventh century, and of what this part of the country must have been with its woods and thickets and marshes, and its scattered villages with their surrounding clearings, it would not be difficult to re-people this neighbourhood in imagination with its Saxon lord and his family, still in virtually independent possession of his vast estates extending from Ingbirchworth in the West, to Brierley in the East, surrounded by numerous dependents holding land of him in the various hamlets round, himself a man of many noble qualities and much manly energy, neither free from the vices common to his times, nor yet altogether careless of his duties and responsibilities as a Christian and a landlord. It is to these Anglo-Saxon forefathers that we owe some of our national better qualities, and nearly all those great religious, civil, and political institutions, which are still influencing in their altered form our common national life.
