when caught he might be flogged to death. If the wrong-doer were a
woman-slave she might be burned.

[Sidenote: The Moot]

With the public life of the village however the slave had nothing, the
last in early days little, to do. In its Moot, the common meeting of its
villagers for justice and government, a slave had no place or voice,
while the last was originally represented by the lord whose land he
tilled. The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely in the
body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the moot-hill or the sacred
tree where the community met from time to time to deal out its own
justice and to make its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the
freedom of the township, and bye-laws framed and headman and tithing-man
chosen for its governance. Here plough-land and meadow-land were shared
in due lot among the villagers, and field and homestead passed from man
to man by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here strife of farmer
with farmer was settled according to the "customs" of the township as its
elder men stated them, and four men were chosen to follow headman or
ealdorman to hundred-court or war. It is with a reverence such as is
stirred by the sight of the head-waters of some mighty river that one
looks back to these village-moots of Friesland or Sleswick. It was here
that England learned to be a "mother of Parliaments." It was in these
tiny knots of farmers that the men from whom Englishmen were to spring
learned the worth of public opinion, of public discussion, the worth of
the agreement, the "common sense," the general conviction to which
discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their force from being
expressions of that general conviction. A humourist of our own day has
laughed at Parliaments as "talking shops," and the laugh has been echoed
by some who have taken humour for argument. But talk is persuasion, and