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Updated: June 1, 2025
My prestige was a bit too flamboyant, Cissie. All I had to do was to mention a plan. The Sons and Daughters didn't even discuss it. They put it right through. That wasn't healthy. Our whole system of society, all democracies are based on discussion. Our old Witenagemot " "But it wasn't our old Witenagemot," said the girl. "Well no," admitted the mulatto, "that's true."
But if they fail, they are thrown to the dogs without mercy, whether the tenure of office be complete or incomplete. It is the old Saxon idea of the Witenagemot the council of a few wise men ruling the clan. There is the fountain spring of Canadian loyalty to the monarchical idea. It is not the fat king. It is not any king.
Connected with the king was a sort of Parliament, called the Witenagemot, or Meeting of the Wise, composed originally of all freemen, and then of the great men, the Ealdormen, the king's thanes. After the Saxons were converted, the bishops and abbots belonged to it. In minor affairs, the "mark," or township, governed itself. He was called the king of England.
But as the tribes got amalgamated, were associated together, or at least localized instead of wandering about, and particularly when they got localized in England where before they had been but a roaming people on account of their struggles with the Britons the necessity of greater organization probably became obvious to them at once, and the Witenagemot readily assumed a somewhat more formal form; and that resulted in representation.
But that of France was, before the twelfth century, seldom convened, sparsely attended, and generally ignored by the greater feudatories, a conference of partisans rather than a parliament. In England the Great Council of the Norman dynasty, inheriting the prestige and the claims of the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, held from the first a more respectable position.
The legislative machinery of the Church threatened to disappear in that of the State. An outside body, the witenagemot, seemed about to acquire the right of imposing rules and regulations upon the Church, and another outside power, the king, to acquire the right of appointing its officers.
So that was the second stage of the Witenagemot, and then it properly begins to be called the Great Assembly or Council of the people. This representative assembly was then not only legislative, it was also executive, to some extent, and entirely judicial; for we are a thousand years before the notion of the threefold division of government has occurred to any one.
The Great Council still survived as the relic and heir both of the English Witenagemot and the Norman Feudal Court. But in matters of State its "counsel" was scarcely asked or given; its "consent" was yielded as a mere matter of form; no discussion or hesitation interrupted the formal and pompous display of final submission to the royal will.
The Witenagemot, undoubtedly, was originally a universal assembly of the tribe in question.
They are the chief contributions of that race to the political development of civilization. The expedient of representation first found its beginning in the Saxon witenagemot. It was lost in the Norman conquest. It was restored step by step, through the centuries in which parliament established its power as an institution through the granting or withholding of aids and taxes for the king's use.
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