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Homer's harp is broken and Horace's lyre is unstrung, and the voices of the great singers are hushed; but their songs their songs are imperishable. O friend! what moots it to them or to us who gave this epic or that lyric to immortality? The singer belongs to a year, his song to all time.
Blow three moots on the horn, Mary, that the varlets may set the table, for the growing shadow and my loosening belt warn me that it is time." In the days of which you read all classes, save perhaps the very poor, fared better in meat and in drink than they have ever done since.
"The cases were put" after the earlier repast, and twice or thrice a week moots were "brought in" after the later meal. The students were also encouraged to assemble towards the close of each day and practise 'case-putting' in their gardens and in the cloisters of the Temple or Lincoln's Inn.
So long as 'moots' lasted, it was the fashion with eminent counsel to accost students in Westminster Hall, and gossip with them about legal matters. Chief Justice Saunders, during the days of his pre-eminence at the bar, never walked through Westminster Hall without a train of lads at his heels.
The representation people had enjoyed in the shire and hundred moots had been a boon, not because it enabled a few privileged persons to attend, but because by their attendance the mass were enabled to stay away. If the lord or his steward would go in person, his attendance exempted all his tenants; if he would not, the reeve and four "best" men from each township had to go.
The aged warrior counsellor, as Starcad here and Master Hildebrand in the "Nibelungenlied", is one type of these persons, another is the false counsellor, as Woden in guise of Bruni, another the braggart, as Hunferth in "Beowulf's Lay". At "moots" where laws are made, kings and regents chosen, cases judged, resolutions taken of national importance, there are discussions, as in that armed most the host.
But it should be observed, that though for all practical purposes 'moots' and 'case-puttings' ceased in Charles II.'s time, they were not formally abolished. Indeed, they lingered on throughout the eighteenth century, and to the present time when vestiges of them may still be observed in the usages and discipline of the Inns.
Anciently, the "moots" were held on the terrace of the Garden at five of the clock in the long summer evenings. The great hall of the Middle Temple is one of the finest Elizabethan structures in the metropolis. It was commenced in 1562, when the old hall was converted into chambers, consumed a decade in building, and is of grand proportions.
In Anglo-Saxon times, when a weak king appeared, the shire moots, or the rulers of groups of shires, exercised the authority which the central government had lost.
Each village had its "best" men, generally four in number, who attended the moots of the larger districts called the Hundreds; and the "best" were probably those who had inherited or acquired the best homesteads.
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