city to maintain the walls and dwellings in good repair and to take charge of a third of the total produce of the tenement to provide against an emergency. The remaining eight worked in the fields, but in the event of an attack withdrew to the city to defend it against the invader. The establishment of a colony of robbers and bandits on the outskirts of Merseburg is an interesting experiment. It was the condition of their tenure that they should only employ their craft of larceny and plunder against their Slavonic neighbours. In many of these reforms, it is thought, Henry had the example of England before his eyes. England had been alike defenceless and open to the attacks of the Danish invaders until Alfred and his son Edward the Elder adopted measures which not only checked their forward movement but even drove them back and kept them prescribed limits. In 929 Henry asked his English contemporary Aethelstan for an English princess for his son Otto. The negotiations, which ended in Otto's marriage with Edith, brought Henry into close touch with England and English policy, and it is not difficult to believe that through this connexion he found the pattern on which to model his plans for the defence of his kingdom[1]. The army no less than the system of defence required radical reform. The heerbann, corresponding to the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, composed of the freemen—a class which in course of years had considerably diminished in numbers—was untrained and difficult to mobilise. Being an infantry force, it was moreover wholly inadequate to cope with the Hungarian horsemen. Hence it was essential for the Saxons to learn to fight on horseback. The ministeriales established on the Wendish marches became the nucleus of the new army. But Henry seems to have exacted knight service whenever possible throughout Saxony and even in the heerbann, which continued often to be summoned in times of national danger, the cavalry element gradually became predominant.
Henry tested the mettle of his reorganised army in the campaigns against the Slavs. These restless people dwelling in the forest and swamp lands between the Elbe and the Oder had been intermittently at war with the Germans since the time of Charles the Great. But the warfare had been conducted by the Saxon nobles for private ends and with a view to
- ↑ Lappenberg, I. 365, and Giesebrecht, I. 811, lay stress on the connexion. Cf. the fortresses of Edward the Elder on the Danish border, and also the regulation with respect to the towns. Giesebrecht, loc. cit., restores from Widukind, I. 35, what he believes to be the words of a law of Henry I, ut concilia et omnes conventus atque convivia in urbibus celebrentur. Similarly Edward had ordained "that all marketing was to be done 'within port' or market town." Vide laws of King Edward I, I. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I. 139, Quod si quis extra portum barganniet, ouerhyrnesse regis culpa sit. Again, Widukind's statement that of every nine military tenants one should live in the city and the rest mind the fields suggests Alfred's system of keeping one man in the host to every one in the country (A.S. Chron. anno 894). Cf. the system of classing the household warriors in three divisions, each of which served in rotation for a period of a month (Asser, ed. Stevenson, c. 100).
