*4. The Witenagemot.*--Associated with the king in the conduct of public business was the council of wise men, or witenagemot. The composition of this body, being determined in the main by the will of the individual monarch, varied widely from time to time. The persons most likely to be summoned were the members of the royal family, the greater ecclesiastics, the king's gesiths or thegns, the ealdormen who administered the shires, other leading officers of state and of the household, and the principal men who held land directly of the king. There were included no popularly elected representatives. As a rule, the witan was called together three or four times a year. Acting with the king, it made laws, imposed taxes, concluded treaties, appointed ealdormen and bishops, and occasionally heard cases not disposed of in the courts of the shire and hundred. It was the witan, furthermore, that elected the king; and since it could depose him, he was obliged to recognize a certain responsibility to it. "It has been a marked and important feature in our constitutional history," it is pointed out by Anson, "that the king has never, in theory, acted in matters of state without the counsel and consent of a body of advisers."[5] [Footnote 5: Law and Custom of the Constitution, II., Pt. 1., 7. Cf. W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, I., 127.] *5. Township, Borough, and Hundred.*--By reason of their persistence, and their comparative changelessness from earliest times to the later nineteenth century, the utmost importance attaches to Anglo-Saxon arrangements respecting local government and administration. The smallest governmental unit was the township, comprising normally a village surrounded by arable lands, meadows, and woodland. The town-moot was a primary assembly of the freemen of the village, by which, under the presidency of a reeve, the affairs of the township were administered. A variation of the township was the burgh, or borough, whose population was apt to be larger and whose political independence was greater; but its arrangements for government approximated closely those of the ordinary township. A group of townships comprised a hundred. At the head of the hundred was a hundred-man, ordinarily elected, but not infrequently appointed by a great landowner or prelate to whom the lands of the hundred belonged. Assisting him was a council of twelve or more freemen. In the (p. 005) hundred-moot was introduced the principle of representation, for to the meetings of that body came regularly the reeve, the parish priest, and four "best men" from each of the townships and boroughs comprised within the hundred. The hundred-moot met as often as once a month, and it had as its principal function the adjudication of disputes and the decision of cases, civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical.