PASTUS or CONVIVIUM, _Cyninges feorm_.—One of the royal duties was to make, in person or by deputy, periodical journeys through the country, progresses, in the course of which the king visited different districts, proclaimed his peace, confirmed the rights and privileges of the freemen or free communities, and heard complaints against the officers of the executive, if such had arisen during the exercise of their functions. This, which on its first occurrence immediately after his election was known in Germany by the name of the _Einritt ins land_, or _Landbereisung_[95], was probably connected with the principle of the king’s being the proper guardian of the boundaries: and in the period when the people had lost the power of electing their king at a general meeting, it may have served the purpose of giving them an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the person of their ruler. It is difficult to say when the system of progresses entirely ceased; but there can be no doubt that it subsisted in one form or another till a very late period in England. Under the Anglosaxon law it was by no means a matter of amusement or caprice, but of positive duty, on the part of the king; and Royalty _in eyre_ was a necessary condition of a state of society which would have rejected as a ludicrous tyranny the pretension of any one city to be the central deposit of all the powers and machinery of government. The kings of the Merwingian race in France, who probably retained something of an old priestly character, made these circuits in the celebrated chariot drawn by oxen, which later and ill-informed writers have imagined was a sign of their degradation, instead of their dignity[96]. Of this particular part of the ceremony no trace remains in England, and it is probable that as occasion served, the king either rode on horseback, circumnavigated, or was towed or rowed along the navigable rivers[97]. On these occasions particularly, he had a right to claim harbour and refection for himself and a certain number of his suite in various places, principally religious houses. These claims, which answer in many respects to the _procuratio_ of the ecclesiastical law, were gradually extended so as to include the royal commissioners or _Missi_, and in many cases became a fixed charge upon the lands, whether the king actually visited them or not[98]. Very many of the charters granted to monasteries record the exemption from them, purchased at a heavy price by prelates, from his avarice or piety[99]. And as the king himself gradually ceased to undertake these distant and fatiguing expeditions, and entrusted to his special messengers the task of seeing and hearing for him, so they in time established a claim to harbourage and reception in the same places. This was extended to all public officers going on the king’s affairs, called Angelcynnes men, Fæsting men, Rǽde fasting, and the like: to all messengers dispatched on the