The military organization of the tribe thus gave from the first its form
to the civil organization. But the peculiar shape which its civil
organization assumed was determined by a principle familiar to the
Germanic races and destined to exercise a vast influence on the future of
mankind. This was the principle of representation. The four or ten
villagers who followed the reeve of each township to the general muster
of the hundred were held to represent the whole body of the township from
whence they came. Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing, their
pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a moot which was made by this
gathering of the representatives of the townships that lay within its
bounds, thus became at once a court of appeal from the moots of each
separate village as well as of arbitration in dispute between township
and township. The judgement of graver crimes and of life or death fell to
its share; while it necessarily possessed the same right of law-making
for the hundred that the village-moot possessed for each separate
village. And as hundred-moot stood above town-moot, so above the
hundred-moot stood the Folk-moot, the general muster of the people in
arms, at once war-host and highest law-court and general Parliament of
the tribe. But whether in Folk-moot or hundred-moot, the principle of
representation was preserved. In both the constitutional forms, the forms
of deliberation and decision, were the same. In each the priests
proclaimed silence, the ealdormen of higher blood spoke, groups of
freemen from each township stood round, shaking their spears in assent,
clashing shields in applause, settling matters in the end by loud shouts
of "Aye" or "Nay."

[Sidenote: Social Life]

Of the social or the industrial life of our fathers in this older England