96 THE ANCESTOR that the ordinary freeman had no real share of political power. Under Charlemagne the freeman had fallen so low as to be excluded by law from the national assemblies, and in the vast majority of cases had already commended himself to a lord. Amongst the Franks the state of the case was even worse, for before the year 900 the free tribesmen had sunk until they were little above the level of slaves, and were ever slipping down into the servile class.^ In England the ceorl, when we first meet with him, is seldom entirely free ; he owes rent in labour or kind or money for his lands ; he rides and carries and goes on errands at his lord's command ; at the freest, with but few exceptions, he has commended himself to some thane from whom he may not depart.^ I do not deny that in the ninth and tenth centuries the ceorl is following the downward path to- wards serfdom, being depressed by the institution of kingship, the rise of the thanes and the influence of the Church ; so much is clearly proved by the wergild set upon his head which, as time goes on, becomes actually or relatively smaller.^ But I say that he had entered upon that path before the sixth cen- tury. In the seventh century commendation was a common if not a usual practice both in England and Germany,* and amongst the Saxons on the continent the ealdormen seem to have been arbitrary rulers who did not hesitate to wipe out with fire and sword a township which had offended them.^ Let us apply to these facts our new discovery that in the seventh century, and probably much earlier, the ceorl, like the villanus of Domesday, was in a sense unfree, and it will open to our view, as by a flash of lightning, a later stage in the develop- ment of German institutions than that which Tacitus described. The ealdorman has made good the claims of hereditary descent, and the eorls in his comitatus are already in a sense servants or thanes. The ordinary freeman is oppressed with food rents and labour dues, and in many cases has commended himself to a lord. None but the ealdormen and older eorls are entirely free. Such, I imagine, was the state of society amongst the Saxons and Angles before they left the continent, for military expeditions across the sea require a capitalist, and it was not ^ Enc. Brit. ix. 533. ^ Maitland's Domesday and Beyondy pp. 327-32. ^ Stubbs, Constit. Hist. i. 175. ^ See the Laws of Ina ; and Seebohm, Early Vill. Comm. p. 317.
- Bede, Book. v. chap. x.
