Scandinavian-Britain

l6oSCANDINAVIAN BRITAINthe Danelaw, Mercia and Wessex was repeated.Thegeneral lines of government and society already laiddown are followed without much change, though therenot a new thing,is a tendency to closer organisationbut leading in the direction of feudalism. It used tobe thought, for example, that private jurisdiction camein with Kniit, but Professor Maitland {Domesday Bookand Beyond, p. 282) has shown that express grants ofsac and soc were known in the tenth century. UnderKniit, however, the mutual responsibility on whichorder and justice were based seems to have becomerather more territorial than merely personal ; everyfreeman over twelve years of age was to be enrolled in1a Hundred and Tithing. The hundred court hadto see justice done, failing which the king's justicecould be appealed to; he alone could decide casesinvolving outlawry, and had the dues in certain causes,such as highway robbery (whence "the king's highway"),and other breaches of the peace not coveredby the popular courts. In the county court the bishopand the ealdorman still presided, no distinction beingmade between the administration of ecclesiastical andthat of secular law. Nor was any distinction made to1Bishop Stubbs (Const. Hist., i. p. 94) says that in the socalledLaws of Edward the Confessor, a twelfth-century compilationbased on the Laws of Kniit, men were bound to associatein groups of ten, called frithborh in the south, but tenmannetalein the north ; adding that tenmentale in Richmondshire was,temp. Henry II., an extent of fourteen carucates, paying 4$. >jd.annual tax. Maitland (Domesday Book, p. 387) remarks thatthe unit of land in Sweden is the mantal. We may add thatmanntal in the old Icelandic law means a "muster, census,"which may explain tenmantal= frithborh, temp. Knut.