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The Coming of Christianity
The Coming of Christianity; Part 5

The Coming of Christianity; Part 5

If we look for the results of the conversion upon our country, the first is here. A united Church gave the example for a united people; union under one archbishop accustomed men to think of union under one king; if they were alike in religion, they might well be alike in law and government. And we shall see that this soon came to pass; the old petty kingdoms died out or were absorbed, until one kingdom - that of Wessex - became the kingdom of England.

The Church offered an example of union; it also offered an example of peace. Among the Saxons men had been chiefly thought of for their valour. Theirs was the rule of might; little was thought of right. Their system of justice was based on the ideas of private vengeance or of fines paid in compensation for wrongs done. When a murder, a theft, or some deed of violence had been committed, the accused person had to be produced by his kindred. If he did not appear, he was declared outlawed, and the injured man or his relations could exact what vengeance they pleased, if they found him. If he pleaded that he was innocent, he was required to support his oath by men who would swear to his being an honest man, and one to be believed. These were called compurgators. If he could not get sufficient compurgators, he had to go through the ordeal, an appeal to the judgment of Heaven. He put his arm into boiling water, or had to walk over red-hot ploughshares or carry a red-hot bar three paces. If the scars were not healed in three days he was judged guilty. In that event he was dealt with as if he had pleaded guilty; that is to say, he was fined according to his crime. Part went to the king, as a compensation for a breach of the king's peace; part went to the injured man, or, in the case of a murder, to his kindred. The amount of this fine partly depended on the gravity of the injury done, but partly also on the rank of the man injured. To kill a thegn was more heinous than to kill a ceorl, and therefore a higher wergild had to be paid.

Thus the Saxon conception of justice was bad. It encouraged private vengeance, which only leads to more violence and makes one crime produce many others; it has little idea of a trial, since by the ordeal it threw on Providence or chance the task of deciding guilt, a task which men can perform for themselves; by compurgation it favoured the strong and noble against the poor and simple, since a great man's oath outweighed the oaths of many small men; and, finally, it had practically no idea of a crime against the state.

The Church, however, held a loftier view about misdeeds than merely regarding them as wrongs to a person. They were more than wrongs, they were also sins on the part of the doer. Theodore and his parish clergy taught that such acts must not only be compensated by fines, but atoned for by repentance and penance; and the penances, consisting of fasting, pilgrimage, and assiduous prayer, acted as very real punishments. Till the penance was discharged the guilty man was outside the pale of the Church and its protection. Thus not only did the penitential system, by adding further punishment, check misdeeds and discourage habits of gluttony, drunkenness, and vice, which the Saxons had hitherto thought excusable or even praiseworthy, but it strengthened the idea that such wrongdoers were offenders against the whole body of the community. When this point is reached we get a much higher standard of justice, in which certain offences are treated as crimes, and dealt with by the state as offences against itself.

Chronology

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