Maybe many of the principal changes in English society until the eighteenth century came before the Conquest. This has been most boldly and interestingly argued by W. G. Runciman. For him a key element is rates of ‘social mobility’ which ‘accelerated steadily’ between the eighth century and the eleventh. He maintains that

The interrelated factors he considers are economic development leading to increasing social differentiation and distancing; a related and notable increase in the power and capacity of government; and Christianisation. Inevitably, there is little difficulty in hinting at possible flaws or gaps in so commandingly arresting an argument. In particular its force may be tempered by consideration of the unavoidable risk in assuming that the increasing abundance of sources as the centuries go by reflects an increasingly complex society with more and more openings for mobility. Some warning against such implied simplification of the barely documented, earlier Anglo-Saxon past is given by the survival of better sources from Ireland. For example, it is tempting to associate late Anglo-Saxon texts relating to the possibility of social promotion with the opportunities offered by developing regimes of government and economic organisation. But much the same kind of promotion is envisaged in fuller Irish sources several centuries earlier. There is a risk of underestimating the complexity and sophistication of the organisation of Germanic or Celtic peoples in the early ‘Dark Ages’.

Attention to some of the problems so well indicated by Runciman can begin with the early laws. Major apparent indications of social organisation are these. First, closeness between the highest and lowest of the free in wergeld terms, a three to one ratio in Kent; no more than six to one in Wessex. Second, complication: in Wessex a middling class with a wergeld of 600 and a ‘half Saxon rate’ provision for Britons; in Kent four classes of free widows and three classes of half-free laets and three of slaves.