vengeance on the slayer himself, who was to be treated by every one as an outlaw and to forfeit all he possessed. Here we have the first recorded attempt in England to put down the time-honoured institution of the blood feud, and to make each man responsible only for his own acts, and to break up the solidarity of the powerful family groups, whose feeling of cousinship often reduced the authority of the state to a shadow. Needless to say the good old custom of following up feuds relentlessly, generation after generation, was at first little abated by this well-meant edict. Its promulgation however marks the spread of a civilising movement which was ultimately to make away with the whole system of private war and wergilds.
Another movement, which was also making gradual progress at this time, and may perhaps therefore be best mentioned here, though it had begun before Edmund's day and was not completed in his reign, concerns the position and functions of the magnates in charge of the shires. All through the centuries of the Heptarchy and down to Alfred's death, each shire, so far as our information goes, had been ruled by its own "scirman," called indifferently either duke, prefect or alderman, most of whom were of royal descent. As soon however as England began to be unified, a demand for wider jurisdictions arose. A shire apiece had been all that the magnates could expect, so long as their king himself ruled only Wessex or Mercia, but their ambitions naturally expanded in proportion with the growth of the kingdom. As the tenth century advanced they accordingly pressed Edward the Elder and his sons more and more to abandon the old scheme of one duke to one shire, and gradually succeeded in getting a new system introduced under which the shires were grouped three or four together with a duke over each group. It must have been a protracted process changing from one system to the other, but the results as they stood in Edmund's day are clear enough, and may be inferred from the lists of magnates who are found attesting his numerous charters. If these be analysed, it is seen that, apart from "jarls" with Danish names, who still ruled districts in the Five Boroughs and beyond the Humber, the total number of dukes attesting at one time is never more than eight, and these can be distributed with moderate certainty over Southern England in the proportion of three to the counties south of the Thames and five to the Midlands and East Anglia[1]. This change, moreover, carried with it another. The new type of dukes could not always be present to preside in the shire-moots. Hence there arose the need for local officials of a lower grade intermediate between the port-reeves and the dukes, a class who seem to be referred to for the first time in the laws of Aethelstan and who ultimately came to be entitled "scirgerefan" or shire-reeves[2].
