band in its descent upon the coast, made it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or to call to them when their work was done, the wives and children, the laet and slave, even the cattle they had left behind them.  The first wave of conquest was but the prelude to the gradual migration of a whole people.  It was England which settled down on British soil, England with its own language, its own laws, its complete social fabric, its system of village life and village culture, its township and its hundred, its principle of kinship, its principle of representation.  It was not as mere pirates or stray war-bands, but as peoples already made, and fitted by a common temper and common customs to draw together into our English nation in the days to come, that our fathers left their German home-land for the land in which we live.  Their social and political organization remained radically unchanged.  In each of the little kingdoms which rose on the wreck of Britain, the host camped on the land it had won, and the divisions of the host supplied here as in its older home the rough groundwork of local distribution.  The land occupied by the hundred warriors who formed the unit of military organization became perhaps the local hundred; but it is needless to attach any notion of precise uniformity, either in the number of settlers or in the area of their settlement, to such a process as this, any more than to the army organization which the process of distribution reflected.  From the large amount of public land which we find existing afterwards it has been conjectured with some probability that the number of settlers was far too small to occupy the whole of the country at their disposal, and this unoccupied ground became “folk-land,” the common property of the tribe as at a later time of the nation.  What ground was actually occupied may have been assigned to each group and each family in the group by lot, and Eorl and Ceorl gathered round them their laet and slave as in their homeland by the Rhine or the Elbe.  And with the English people passed to the shores of Britain all that was to make Englishmen what they are.  For distant and dim as their life in that older England may have seemed to us, the whole after-life of Englishmen was there.  In its village-moots lay our Parliament; in the gleeman of its village-feasts our Chaucer and our Shakspere; in the pirate-bark stealing from creek to creek our Drakes and our Nelsons.  Even the national temper was fully formed.  Civilization, letters, science, religion itself, have done little to change the inner mood of Englishmen.  That love of venture and of toil, of the sea and the fight, that trust in manhood and the might of man, that silent awe of the mysteries of life and death which lay deep in English souls then as now, passed with Englishmen to the land which Englishmen had won.

[Sidenote:  The King]