Early Britain eBook

The exact amount of the population of England cannot be ascertained, even approximately; but we may obtain a rough approximation from the estimates based upon Domesday Book.  It seems probable that at the end of the Conqueror’s reign, England contained 1,800,000 souls.  Allowing for the large number of persons introduced at the Conquest, and for the natural increase during the unusual peace in the reigns of Cnut, of Eadward the Confessor, and, above all, of William himself, we may guess that it could not have contained more than a million and a quarter in the days of Eadgar.  London may have had a population of some 10,000; Winchester and York of 5,000 each; certainly that of York at the date of Domesday could not have exceeded 7,000 persons, and we know that it contained 1,800 houses in the time of Eadward the Confessor.

The organisation of the country continued on the lines of the old constitution.  But the importance of the simple freeman had now quite died out, and the gemot was rather a meeting of the earls, bishops, abbots, and wealthy landholders, than a real assembly of the people.  The sub-divisions of the kingdom were now pretty generally conterminous with the modern counties.  In Wessex and the east the counties are either older kingdoms, like Kent, Sussex, and Essex; or else tribal divisions of the kingdom, like Dorset, Somerset, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Surrey.  In Mercia, the recovered country is artificially mapped out round the chief Danish burgs, as in the case of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire, where the county town usually occupies the centre of the arbitrary shire.  In Northumbria it is divided into equally artificial counties by the rivers.  Beneath the counties stood the older organisation of the hundred, and beneath that again the primitive unit of the township, known on its ecclesiastical side as the parish.  In the reign of Eadgar, England seems to have contained about 3,000 parish churches.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE DECADENCE.

The death of Dunstan was the signal for the breaking down of the artificial kingdom which he had held together by the mere power of his solitary organising capacity.  AEthelred, the son of Eadgar (who succeeded after the brief reign of his brother Eadward), lost hopelessly all hold over the Scandinavian north.  At the same time, the wicking incursions, intermitted for nearly a century, once more recommenced with the same vigour as of old.  Even before Dunstan’s death, in 980, the pirates ravaged Southampton, killing most of the townsfolk; and they also pillaged Thanet, while another host overran Cheshire.  In the succeeding year, “great harm was done in Devonshire and in Wales;” and a year later again, London was burnt and Portland ravaged.  In 985, AEthelred, the Unready, as after ages called him, from his lack of rede or counsel, quarrelled with AElfric, ealdormen of the Mercians, whom he drove over sea.