SAXON JUSTICE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1146, 6 June 1911, Page 6

SAXON JUSTICE.

A LETTER TO SOMERSETSHIRE,

THE KING AT THE GATE.

[Br J.Q.X.]

Dear n.G.C.-I have already written to thank you for the gift of Knight's "Somerset"—"in joyous memory of one never-to-be-forgotlcn Enstcr at Sidcot." And, indeed, it is still with me, as with you, a joyous memory, that Easter when we first 'met 1\ A. Knight, naturalist, poet, topographer, historian, and Somersetshire man. But I have a confession to make. The little, green-covered book has already passed from tablo to shelf, from reading to reference. During the last few weeks our native county has ssenied very far away. Ilalf-unconscious-ly, I have asked myself, "What has the Shire of tho Sea Mere Settlers to do with New Zealand?" And the shelving of the book was the answer. Beautiful antiquity, boyish dreams, memories of adolescence-theso were but for intervals of relaxation. Life had to bo lived strenuously in this bustling, contentious "land without a past." But last night, as I sat at my writingtable, my idle hand wandered against another token from tho old shire. This was a small representation in brass-made as a door-knocker, though I use it as a paper-wcight-of Alfred's Tower. You and I have stood many times before that hu"O pile of weather-mellowed brick. We have climbed its high-peaked turret and thence, over the fields and little towns where our forbears laboured and trafficked, and beyond the mounded height which we deem was Camelot, and tho towered summit of Avalon, we have caught, when the day was kind, the white gleam of that Severn Sea which joins our nook and harbourage and nurserv of Somoi-S2t to the ends ot the earth. And wo have read tho inscription, on tho tablet over the doorway. lou can verify it on any half-holiday. I can only "remember a few broken phrases: ■Ufred, the light of a benighted age, the founder of tho English monarchy and liberty . . . established trial by iurv . . • originated the Navy . . . on'this hill set up his standard against Danish invaders. When tho little brass knocker set these words in my head, my mental furniture suddenly began to re-arrangn iMf. Alfred and Somerset came out ot their mists of anciont dream, and showed themselves as up-to-date as Lambton Quav. "The English Monarch.y"-that is to be "lorilied in high carnival this vcij month. "Trial by jury" is enough alive to have been satirised by tho brilliant librettist who died but ti few days ago. It was discussed only last week (and honoured in the discussion) by tho Wellington Provincial Farmers' Union in conference assembled. "Tho Navy —we seem, once in a while, to hear some talk ot that But "English liberty"—that best of all liberty, the lawful, the constitutional, the historical—has been in some danger of being forgotten hero in New Zealand. The "audacity of elected persons," the impatience of philanthropists, have caused it to be undervalued. I think if King Alfred could come back and visit New Zealand, that is what he would tell us.

"Tho English people should be as free as their own thoughts." That is the only sentence I can remember out of my first history book, "Little Arthur's England." It'was what Alfred'said to his son and successor, Edward the Elder. Tho story may be no better founded than those of the burning cakes and tho harping in Outhnim's camp, but I think it is characteristic. It would be too revolutionary to teach in the State schools of a country where a man can he haled before a magistrate for allowing his son to paint a fenco without asking the permission of the Painters' Union.

It is good to know that the inscription on the tower, though not strictly historical, is nothing worse than an exaggeration. Perhaps Alfred did not found the English monarchy, but ho did save England from the Danes; and, by the way, it is pleasant to loarn from our little green book that Etbandune, whore the decisive battle wns fought, may have been the Somersetshire, instead of the Wiltshire Edington. Ho may not have originated trial by jury, and yet I find in Green's "Short History" that he reorganised public justice and made it his main work "to enforce submission to the justice of hundred-moot and shire-moot alike on noblo and ceorl, 'who wore constantly at obstinate variance with one another in the folkmoots, so that hardly any one of them would grant that to "be true doom that had been judged for doom by tho oaldormen and reeves.'" I like that., Tho justice that was done in public, at tho meeting of all the people of the shire or the hundred, was to be enforced equally against the honourable gentlemen and the_ man in the street. They were not satisfied with tho judgments that were given—presumably "in Chambers"—by the legal experts. Tho whole trouble, you see, was quite modern and antipodean.

Tho King was not an innovator. He did not promulgate any lcad-the-world legislation. "Those things which I met with, either of the days of Ini my kinsman, or of Offa, King of the Mercians, or of Ethelbert, who first among the English race received baptisms, those which seemed to mo Tightest, those I have gathered, and rejected the others." He did not call his prisons hospitals for tho morally infirm, nor expatiate upon the statistics of recidivism; but was it not in his timethat men said they could hang jewels on the hedges and nobody would touch them ? I must tell you —for digressions aro permissible in a letter- —that on a later page of Green's "Short History" there is a delightful picture of a "King and Minister doing Justice at a Gate." It. is copied froni an eleventh-century manuscript. This, you will notice, is not the justice of the shim-moot, but it is still a very public kind of justice. The King anil the Minister aro seated actually in tho gateway. Nobody can be shut jii or out. They Mock the traffic, so that the casual passenger is forced to stop and see justice done. The Court docs not withdraw itself from the common gaze; it actually thrusts itself in tho way of tho public. Tho modest and retiring disposition of the litigants is not considered at all. I tako it that the picture is somewhat conventional. It is intended to set forth, not an actual trial of a case, but those ideas of justice which were current in the days of Edward the Confessor. Thb Minister holds in one hand a great sword—justice must be prompt and sharp. The King is unarmed—there may be royal clemency. The town gate is blocked—anybody's business may wait for that which is everybody's business. Most remarkable of all, the King's two hands and the disengaged hand of the Minister are held straight in front of them, palms outwards, fingers spread, and pointing upwards. What does it mean? Are they astonished at some tale of woe which that eager petitioner is telling? Their firm and placid faces forbid the supposition. It appears to me that th« artist wanted to show how necessary it was that Judges should roceivo no sort of special payments. To-day, when we have advanced so far that King and Judge, Minister and sheriff are differentiated, it is still necessary in Now Zealand to assert, not indeed what tho old artist asserted, but tho kindred principle that in order to keep the Judges above comment they must receive from the public Treasury nothing more than their salaries. Wo could very well spare a quantity of our modern notions, if wo could get back tho old Saxon justice and tho freedom that Alfred desired for his people. I thank you again for the little book which has reminded me that it was at Athelney, his island fort in tho heart of Somerset, that Alfred kept tho torch of freedom burning clear when tho Danes iiatl mastered all England. "I never, never can vqrget I viist draa'd breath in Zummerzot." And if I should over bo in danger of forgetting, New Zealand itself should remind me, for I havo just read in this most friendly and companionable book that a few miles from Athelney—that Noble Isle—there is "a considerable tract of ground slightly raised above the general level" of the moors that were formerly marshes, and "called the Koylnnd, that is to say, Zealand, or the island." And now, Somerset—Alfred's Somrrjpt and ours—docs not seem so far away from your friend, J.Q.X.