Alfred, that it is said, he hung up golden bracelets near the highways,
and no man dared to touch them.

Earl Godwin, in order to appease Hardicanute, (whose brother he had been
instrumental in murdering,) made him a magnificent present of a galley
with a gilt stern, rowed by fourscore men, who wore each of them a golden
bracelet on his arm, weighing sixteen ounces, and were clothed and armed
in the most sumptuous manner. Hardicanute pleased with the splendour of
the spectacle, quickly forgot his brother's murder, and on Godwin's
swearing that he was innocent of the crime, allowed him to be acquitted.

The cities of England appear by _Domesday Book_, to have been at the
conquest little better than villages; York itself, though it was always
the second, at least the third city in England, contained only 1,418
families; Norwich contained 738 houses; Exeter, 315; Ipswich, 538;
Northampton, 60; Hertford, 146; Bath, 64; Canterbury, 262; Southampton, 84;
and Warwick, 225.

As the extreme ignorance of the age made deeds or writings very rare, the
county or hundred courts were the places where the most remarkable civil
transactions were finished. Here testaments were promulgated, slaves
manumitted, bargains of sale concluded; and sometimes for greater security,
the most remarkable of these deeds were inserted in the blank leaves of
the parish Bible, which thus became a register too sacred to be falsified.
It was not unusual to add to the deed an imprecation on all such as should
be guilty of that crime.

The laws of Alfred enjoin, that if any one know that his enemy or agressor,
after doing him an injury, resolves to keep within his own house and his
own lands, he shall not fight him till he require compensation for the