the tactics of war changed and the time-honoured method of fighting on foot was replaced by reliance on heavy cavalry. These documents in fact shew us how in Edgar's day, side by side with the religious reform, there developed a further drift towards feudalism, an effect of the steady accumulation of land into greater and greater estates. They shew also how prominent a part in this economic evolution may be assigned to the churchmen, for though no other records of estate management have survived, as detailed as those of Worcester, there are plenty of indications that all the ecclesiastical corporations were acting in these matters more or less on uniform lines.
Though the social and religious movements are clearly the most important things that happened in Edgar's reign, it must not be thought that the king remained all his life a mere tool in the hands of the ecclesiastics and had no policy of his own. Like most of his immediate predecessors, he evidently, on coming to manhood, had closely at heart the due maintenance of order in all parts of his realm, and kept constantly amending and sharpening the machinery for enforcing the peace and dispensing justice. His laws no doubt shew the influence of Dunstan in the minuteness with which they deal with tithe and the observance of fasts and festivals, but they are also remarkable for their precise rules as to buying and selling and the pursuit of thieves, as to the maintenance of the suretyship system of frithborhs and as to the periods when the various courts were to be held. Specially famous is his ordinance as to the local courts, which contains the first clear proof of a regular division of the shires for judicial purposes into moderate sized units called "hundreds," each with its own tribunal sitting every four weeks. A further step of somewhat doubtful wisdom, as it tended to undermine the royal authority, was to place some of the hundreds, so far as the administration of justice was concerned, under the control of the reformed monasteries. Considerable districts thereby acquired the status of ecclesiastical franchises, in which the local courts were no longer held in the king's name, and in which the profits of justice went into the coffers of some minster church and not into the king's treasury. The first monastic houses to acquire these franchises, or "sokes" as they were termed in the vernacular (from sócne, the Anglo-Saxon term for jurisdiction), were Peterborough and Ely; and there seems no reason to doubt the local traditions, which tell us that they obtained them from Edgar on their first foundation at the instance of Bishop Aethelwold. No formal Latin charters from the king have come down to us attesting these grants, but in either case there are some curious Anglo-Saxon records[1] still existing which more or less explain their nature. From these we can see that Peterborough obtained judicial control over a block of eight hundreds in Northamptonshire, having Oundle as their
- ↑ For Peterborough cf. Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 1130 and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E, (illegible text). For Ely cf. Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 1267.
