George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 2, 17th edition.

[327] military magistrate from the bench, and reserved

Chap XVI.}

the wearisome toil of deliberation for the learning of his clerk. The emancipation of the country people followed. In every European code, the ages of feudal influence, of mercantile ambition, of the enfranchisement of the yeomanry, appear distinctly in succession.

It is the peculiar glory of England, that her free people always had a share in the government. From the first, her freeholders had legislative power as well as freedom; and the tribunals were subjected to popular influence by the institution of a jury. The majority of her laborers were serfs; many husbandmen were bondmen, as the name implies; but the established liberties of freeholders quickened, in every part of England, the instinct for popular advancement. The Norman invasion could not uproot the ancient institutions; they lived in the heart of the nation, and rose superior to the Conquest.

The history of England is therefore marked by an original, constant and increasing political activity of the people. In the fourteenth century, the peasantry, conducted by tilers, and carters, and ploughmen, demanded of their young king a deliverance from the bondage and burdens of feudal oppression; in the fifteenth century, the last traces of villenage were wiped away; in the sixteenth, the noblest ideas of human destiny, awakening in the common mind, became the central points round which plebeian sects were gathered; in the seventeenth century, the enfranchised yeomanry began to feel an instinct for dominion; and its kindling ambition, quickly fanned to a flame, would not rest till it had attempted a democratic revolution. The best soldiers of the Long Parliament were country people; the men that turned the battle on Marston Moor