But although I cannot admit the growth of an imperial power in any such way, I still believe the royal authority to have been greatly consolidated, and thereby extended, before the close of the sixth century. It is impossible, for a very long period, to look upon the Anglosaxon kingdoms otherwise than as camps, planted upon an enemy’s territory, and not seldom in a state of mutual hostility. All had either originated in, or had at some period fallen into, a state of military organization, in which the leaders are permitted to assume powers very inconsistent with the steady advance of popular liberty; and in the progress of their history, events were continually recurring which favoured the permanent establishment and consolidation of those powers. Upon all their western and northern frontiers lay ever-watchful and dangerous Keltic populations, the co-operation of whose more inland brethren was always to be dreaded, and whose attacks were periodically renewed till very long after the preponderance of one crown over the rest was secured,—attacks only too often favoured by the civil wars and internal struggles of the Germanic conquerors. Upon all the eastern coasts hovered swarms of daring adventurers, ready to put in practice upon the Saxons themselves the frightful lesson of piracy which these had given the Roman world in the third and fourth centuries, and ever welcomed by the Keltic inhabitants as the ministers of their own vengeance. The constant state of military preparation which was thus rendered necessary could have no other result than that of giving a vast preponderance to the warlike over the peaceful institutions; of raising the practised and well-armed comites to a station yearly more and more important; of leading to the multiplication of fortresses, with their royal castellans and stationary garrisons; nay—by constantly placing the freemen under martial law, and inuring them to the urgencies of military command—of finally breaking down the innate feeling and guarantees of freedom, and even of materially ruining the cultivator, all whose energy and all whose time were not too much, if a comfortable subsistence was to be wrung from the soil he owned. It is also necessary to bear in mind the power derived from forcible possession of lands from which the public enemy had been expelled, and which, we may readily believe, turned to the advantage, mostly if not exclusively, of the king and his nobles. No wonder then if at a very early period the Mark-organization, which contained within itself the seeds of its own decay, had begun to give way, and that a systematic _commendation_, as it was called, to the adjacent lords was beginning to take its place. To the operation of these natural causes we must refer the indisputable predominance established by a few superior kings before the end of the sixth century, not only over the numerous dynastic families which still remained