in a yearly discourse, dutifully attributed all the good that was done in the land to the King personally and all the evil to his bad counsellors(31). These may seem two exactly opposite ways of treating a King; but the practice of sacrificing the King, and the practice of treating the King as one who can do no wrong, both start from the same principle, the principle that the King is, somehow or other, inherently different from everybody else. Our own Old-English Kings, like all other Teutonic Kings, were anything but absolute rulers; the nation chose them and the nation could depose them; they could do no important act in peace or war without the national assent; yet still the King, as the King, was felt to hold a rank differing in kind from the rank held by the highest of his subjects. Perhaps the distinction mainly consisted in a certain religious sentiment which attached to the person of the King, and did not attach to the person of any inferior chief. In heathen times, the Kings traced up their descent to the Gods whom the nation worshipped; in Christian times, they were distinguished from lesser rulers by being admitted to their office with ecclesiastical ceremonies; the chosen of the people became also the Anointed of the Lord. The distinction between Kings and rulers of any other kind is strictly immemorial; it is as old as anything that we know of the political institutions of our race. The distinction is clearly marked in the description which I read to you from Tacitus. He distinguishes in a marked way Reges and Duces, Kings and Leaders; Kings whose claim to rule rested on their birth, and leaders whose claim to rule rested on their personal merit. But from the same writer we learn that, though the distinction was so early established and so well understood, it still was not universal among all the branches of the Teutonic race. Of the German nations described by Tacitus, some, he expressly tells us, were governed by Kings, while others were not(32). That is to say, each tribe or district had its own chief, its magistrate in peace and its leader in war, but the whole nation was not united under any one chief who had any claim to the special and mysterious privileges of kingship. That is to say, though we hear of kingship as far back as our accounts will carry us, yet kingship was not the oldest form of government among the Teutonic tribes. The King and his Kingdom came into being by the union of several distinct tribes or districts, which already existed under distinct leaders of their own, and in our own early history we can mark with great clearness the date and circumstances of the introduction of kingship. We should be well pleased to know what were the exact Teutonic words which Tacitus expressed by the Latin equivalents Rex and Dux. As for the latter at least, we can make a fair guess. The Teutonic chief who was not a King bore the title of Ealdorman in peace and of Heretoga in war. The former title needs no explanation. It still lives on among us, though with somewhat less than its ancient dignity. The other title of Heretoga, army-leader, exactly answering to the Latin Dux, has dropped out of our own language, but it survives in High-German under the form of Herzog, which is familiarly and correctly translated by Duke(33). The Duces of Tacitus, there can be no doubt, were Ealdormen or Heretogan. It is less clear what the title was which he intended by Rex. Our word Cyning, King, is common to all the existing Teutonic tongues, and we find it as far back as we can trace the English language(34). But it is not the only, nor seemingly the oldest, word to express the idea. In the oldest monument of Teutonic speech, the Gothic translation of the Scriptures, the word King, in any of its forms, is not found. The word there used is Thiudans(35). And there is a third word Drihten, which in English is most commonly used in a religious sense(36). I would ask you to bear with me while I plunge for a moment into some obsolete Teutonic etymologies, as I think that the analogies of these three words are not a little interesting. All three names come from, or are closely connected with, words meaning the race or people. One of those words, Cyn or Kin, we still keep in modern English with no change of sound and with very little change of meaning. Now, the word Cyning, in its shortened form King, either comes straight from the substantive Cyn, or else from a closely connected adjective Cyne, noble, just like the Latin generosus from Genus, which, let me add, is the same word as our English Cyn. Let no one delude you into thinking that King has anything to do with the canning or cunning man. The man who first said that it had had simply not learned his Old-English grammar(37). It has to do with Cyn and Cyne, and it may be taken as “the noble one,” or, as ing is the Teutonic patronymic, any one that chooses may thus form Cyning from Cyn, and make the King, not the father of his people, but their offspring(38). Now the other two names, Thiudans or Theoden, and Drihten, have dropped out of our language, and so have the two words with which they are connected, just as Cyning is connected with Cyn. Thiduans or Theoden comes from Thiuda or Theod, also meaning people, a word which you will recognize in many of the old Teutonic names, Theodric, Theodberht, Theodbald, and the like. So Drihten either comes straight from Driht, a family or company, or else, just like Cyn and Cyne, from an adjective driht meaning noble or lordly. All these three names expressing kingship have thus to do with words meaning the race or people. They imply the chief of a people, something more than the chief of a mere tribe or district. Now in our Old-English Chronicles, when they tell how the first English Conquerors, Hengest and Horsa, settled in Kent, they do not call them Cyningas but Heretogan, Leaders or Dukes. It is not till after some victories over the Britons that we hear that Hengest took the rice or kingdom, and that his son Æsc is called King. So in Wessex, the first conquerors Cerdic and Cynric are called Ealdormen when they land; but, when they have established a settled dominion at the expense of the Welsh, we read that they too took the rice, and the leaders of the West-Saxons are henceforth spoken of as Kings(39). It is plain then that the first leaders of the English settlements in Britain, when they came over, bore only the lowlier title of Heretoga or Ealdorman; it was only when they had fought battles and found themselves at the head of a powerful and victorious settlement on the conquered soil that they were thought worthy of the higher title of Kings. And we may further believe that, with all their exploits they would not have been thought worthy of it, if they had not been held to come of the blood of the Gods, of the divine stock of Woden.
We thus see that kingship in the strict sense of the word, as distinguished from the government of Dukes or Ealdormen, had its beginning among the English in Britain, not in the very first moment of the Conquest, but in the years which immediately followed it, within the lifetime of the first generation of conquerors. The same distinction which we find among the Angles and Saxons we find also among the kindred nations of Scandinavia. When the Danes and Northmen began those invasions which led to such important settlements in Northern and Eastern England, we always find two marked classes of leaders, the Kings and the Jarls, the same word as Eorl. Of these the Jarls answer to the English Ealdormen(40). The distinction is again clearly marked, when we read that the Old-Saxons, the Saxons of the mainland, were ruled, not by Kings, but by what our Latin writer is pleased to call Satraps—that is, of course, Dukes or Ealdormen(41). But it is most strongly marked of all in several accounts where we read of nations which had been united under Kings falling back again upon the earlier dominion of these smaller local chiefs. Thus the Lombards in Italy, who had been led by Kings to their great conquest, are said for a while to have given up kingly government, and to have again set up a rule of independent Dukes. So the West-Saxons in our own island are said at one time to have cast away kingly government, and to have in the like sort fallen back on the rule of independent Ealdormen(42). In all these cases, we should be glad to know more clearly than we do what was the exact distinction between the King and the Duke or Ealdorman. But it is plain that the King was the representative of a closer national unity, while the Ealdorman represented the tendency on the part of each tribe or district to claim independence for itself. The government of the Ealdorman may not have been less effective than that of the King. If we remember the distinction drawn by Tacitus as to the respective qualifications for the two offices, we may even believe that the rule of the Ealdorman may have been the more effective. But we may be sure that the Ealdorman was felt to be, in some way or other, less distant from the mass of his people than the King was; the place of King could be held only by one of the stock of Woden; the place of Ealdorman, it would seem, was open to any man who showed that he possessed