68
Pri~-;ilziLis~e Folk-Jfoots.
quite sufficient t o establish the fact of open-ail; meetings having been held a t the earliest times t o which our literary sources of knowledge belong. It should be borne in mind that the early English chronicles are not the offspring of the Saxon mind, but of the Roman mind, and the early English charters are, in forin and legal antiquity, not Saxon, but Latin. Thus, wc do not get much that belongs to primitive life, and what there is has becil preserved by accident or under the wing of Latin legal formulze. Again, both chronicle and charter deal, as a rulc, with the most devclopcd portions of the Anglo-Saxon natioilality-thc sovercigll and his court, the abbots and clergy of the Roman Church. Wit11 the peoplc, among whom the primitive forms and the primitive associations were extant, both for a longer period of time and in many more instances, the earliest literary documents have very little, or indced no, coi~i~ection. T h e evidence preserved for the modern student from the peoplc of ancient times is obtained from actual survivals instead of historical examples, and these survivals, of course, existcd (though unrccordcd) throughout the period covered by the evidcnce that has just beell considered.
C H A P T E R IV. THE REVIVAL O F THE PRIAIITIVE FORRI.
Historical Value of the Revival-Evidence of the Nntio?zrcl Assc11z6&revivi~zgits o l d Opez-air Meetifzgs: Mr. Freeman's Examples, Runymede-The LocnC Assenz(l&: Pennenden Heath, Shire-moot of Berks, Mendip-Summary.
I N the coilsideration of "revivals" of the primitive asscmbly Britain, it is well a t once to point out that examples under this head only become historically logical upoil the assuinption that more decisive examples of the primitive assembly are forthcoming. Because if, without any reference to examples from early records, or examples from historical survivals, it were put forth as a proposition that an assembly accustomed to meet accordiilg to moderil practices, but suddenly meeting in the open ail; was simply a mceting of the primitivc assembly in its old form, thcre would clearly be wanting a great deal of evidence to establish it. I t would be necessary to trace back its history to some anterior period when it could be shown to have met in the primitive form, and this would be next to ail impossibility, a t all events in each individual case. I t is allowable, however, to leave the history of any one particular asselnbl~,and fall back upon the general history of the subject as an argument in favour of the theory