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Updated: May 1, 2025
Details of each section of government can not be given here; but several facts should be noted; for they explain the practical workings of Canada's system. The Witenagemot or Saxon council of wise men stands for Canada's ideal of a parliament. It is not so much a question of spoils. It is not so much a case of "the outs" ejecting "the ins."
The English Parliament, as you doubtless know, was the successor, or grew out of the old Witenagemot, the old Saxon Great Council, and that Great Council originally and I am now talking of centuries before the Conquest the Witenagemot, included in theory all the free inhabitants of the realm, just as a modern town meeting does. Mind you, they were then tribes, living in "Hundreds."
Nor should it be in the opposite process, which was equally easy, as when the Saxon chronicler, led by the superficial resemblance and overlooking the great institutional difference, called the curia of William by the Saxon name of witenagemot. With the other side of feudalism, the political, the case was different. That had never grown up in the Saxon world.
He did not hesitate, but in the name of the king confirmed the decisions arrived at by the Gemot of York recognized Morcar as Earl of Northumbria, and granted a complete amnesty for all offences committed during the rising, on condition only that a general Witenagemot should be held at Oxford.
For the law was but universal custom, and that custom had no sanction; but for breach of the custom anybody could make personal attack, or combine with his friends to make attack, on the person that committed the breach, and then, when the matter was taken up by the members of both tribes, and finally by the Witenagemot as a judicial court, the question was, what the law was; and if it was proved, for instance, that the law was that there was private property in that pasture belonging to the man who committed the murder he went off scot free.
As the ancient coronation oath, given in the text, has come down from the Saxontimes, the following remarks of Palgrave will be pertinent, in connection with the oath, as illustrating the fact that, in those times, no special authority attached to the laws of the king: "The Imperial Witenagemot was not a legislative assembly, in the strict sense of the term, for the whole Anglo-Saxon empire.
Not merely different in the matter of graft, but different, so Mr. Newberry said, in the calibre of the men. He recalled how he had been taken as a boy of twelve by his father to hear a debate. He would never forget it. Giants! he said, that was what they were. In fact, the thing was more like a Witenagemot than a legislature.
Such a ministry, composed of thegns or prelates nominated by the king, and constituting in itself a large part of the Witenagemot when that assembly was gathered for legislative purposes, drew the actual control of affairs more and more into the hands of the sovereign himself. But the king's power was still a personal power.
The witenagemot itself retained the ancient form, the bishops and abbots formed a chief part of it, instead of being, as in Normandy, so insignificant an element that their very participation in deliberation has been doubted.
Its Witenagemot or meeting of wise men was the host's council of war, the gathering of those ealdormen who had brought the men of their villages to the field. The host was formed by levies from the various districts of the tribe; the larger of which probably owed their name of "hundreds" to the hundred warriors which each originally sent to it.
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