Spencer Heath Archive

Item 191..

Pencil by Heath on lined notepad paper.

No date

White envelope also contains item 192

/RISE AND FALL OF SAXON ENGLAND/

The earliest contracts are called covenants. They are acts of acknowledgment of ownership open and public before gods and men. They are ceremonial, involving usually a monument, as reminder, or a piece of turf to symbolize the thing owned and in respect to which a new agreement of minds has taken place. The property itself undergoes no change, but there is a new agreement and acknowledgment among men with respect to it. Ownership is the psychological relationship among men under which covenants and contracts are made. Covenant, express or implied, creates all ownership, and contract is the social, the non-violent, process whereby ownership is distributed or transferred entire, or a limited use of the property owned is conveyed for a term.

When written and public (or published) documents supplement the monument or displace the ceremony of conveying the turf these documents then become the acts or deeds whereby new ownerships are created and properties are said to be transferred.

By establishing ownership of property through these non-violent relationships of covenant and contract a population to that extent becomes a society. It abrogates violent relationships among its members and achieves for them a secure and peaceable and thus the productive use and possession of particular marked off parts of its territory and their com­mon use of all the remainder not thus enclosed.

The inhabitants, now become a society, have turned their habitat into a community. They are united by a common psychological bond. Through the accepted conventions of ownership and the practice of covenant and contract in lieu of force and fear, they now become productive instead of predatory and as a society outgrow, both in numbers and in capacity, all merely tribal or family bonds.

When the early Saxon tribes, ceasing to wander, adopted ownership and thereby formed communities, the accepted owners were called land-lords, this meaning givers or distributors of the lands. The lands were held by tenants, called freemen. They were free men because each tenant’s relationship to his lord was not that of master and slave but that of covenant and contract. Furthermore, it was an obligation of the lord not only to distribute by a process of peace but to guarantee quiet possession and thus give the tenant freedom also from wild animals and from wild or violent men. In addition, the lord maintained security and peace in the community and gave his tenants freedom of access and intercommunication and free public places called markets in which to exchange with each other the things they had been free to produce.

For all these freedoms conferred the tenants rendered back to their lords the recompense called rent — originally, called rent-service. This rent was service, indeed, but it was not servitude, because its amount was fixed not by force but by contract and consent or by the custom of long consent.

In these Saxon communities the lands supplied subordinate public officers, such as magistrates, wardens and reeves and, until the Norman occupation all the fighting men and arms required to hold their tenants as free men instead of serfs or slaves.

There is evidence that this Saxon type of free community existed at some period in many parts of the world. It appears to have been a characteristic in all rugged lands as slavery and rulership has been in the warm, flat and fertile portions of the earth.

But this free type of social organization appears to have been early perverted from freedom to servitude wherever exposed to conquest by nomad warriors of the type of Genghis Kahn from wind-swept steppes or by the imperial rulers over Classical slave states in more equable climes and fertile lands.

Owing to exposure to conquest this primitive feudal freedom has seldom been permitted to evolve. When on Europe’s mainland the failing might of Rome could no longer prevent the formation of free communities, her customs and her laws still were potent to pervert from their inception these original movements towards free association. This voluntary relationship of protection and reciprocal services between land lords and free men were distorted and repressed and, bereft of its free spirit only the basic pattern could persist in the servile system that distorted it and darkened Europe for a thousand years.

But Anglo-Saxon England for five centuries escaped this dark heritage of Rome. Ignorant alike of the institutions and traditions of the ancient world, the free barbarians founded their free proprietary communities on services without servitude. Being innocent of political traditions they established no system of tribute, slavery or taxation. While Europe sunk into darkness these proprietary communities rose to Alfred’s age of glory in the midst of Europe’s darkest gloom.

But the Continental ideas, political ambitions and ideals spreading to Alfred’s England sowed the seeds of its submergence under Norman aims. Under the Statute of Westminster and Domesday Book taxation was introduced as the basis of political and tyrannical power. Their land lords no longer able to protect them, the free men of England became the serfs of foreign barons striving among themselves for the despotic kingship that the Tudors at last gained.