throughout the country, the township, or, in thinly populated districts, a cluster of small townships, naturally became in its ecclesiastical aspect the parish of a single priest. Later on the hundred became the deanery, the shire the archdeaconry, while the whole consolidated Kingdom formed the province of the Metropolitan.1

Turning from the divisions of the land to those of the Ranks of the people, we find at the bottom of the social scale the mere people. slaves (theowas, esnas), of whom under the name of servi, Slaves. 25,000 are numbered in Domesday Book, or nearly oneeleventh of the registered population. These were of two kinds (1) hereditary, consisting partly of the descendants of the conquered Britons, partly of persons of the common German stock either descended from the slaves of the first colonists or from freemen who had lost their liberty; (2) penal slaves (wite-theowas), freemen who had been reduced to slavery on account of crime, or through failure to pay a wergild, or by voluntary sale,—the father having power to sell his child of seven, and a child of thirteen having power to sell himself.

Eorls and

As among the Germans of Tacitus we find the distinc- Freemen : tion between the noble and common freeman, so among Ceorls. the English the freemen were broadly divided into eorls and ceorls, the modern meaning of which may be rendered by gentle and simple, or esquire and yeoman.

service.

The rank of the corl rested upon noble birth, and thus The Eorl. formed a perpetual barrier between him and the ceorl. But Nobility by birth gives in England, as in other Germanic countries, a new kind of way to nobility speedily grew up-nobility by military service, nobility by which in the end superseded the nobility by birth. This The Comiarose out of the development of the comitatus, described tatus. by Tacitus, the band of personal followers of the King or other leader. These followers were the gesithas (= com- Gesith. panions); their leader was the hlaford (= loafgiver), in its modern form, Lord, whose title was derived from his character of giver of gifts in acknowledgment of the services

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 224-227. [This theory seems to break down at the Metropolitanate.—ED.]

Thegn.

received. The relation existing between the lord and his followers appears to have gradually assumed a somewhat lower type; the gesith, or companion, became the thegn (= servant); and the service of the King, or other great lord, was eagerly sought by freemen as well for the social dignity as for the material rewards which it ensured. We read of the King's dish-thegn (disc-thegn), bower-thegn (bur-thegn), and horse-thegn or stallere, as personages of high rank and great influence; a feature in our early institutions which has survived to the present day in such offices as those of Lord Chamberlain (bower-thegn) and Master of the Horse. Service to the King, or some great lord, gradually became the only avenue to distinguished rank. The word thegn itself came to be regarded as synonymous with noble or gentle. Among this nobility by service the highest rank comprised the King's thegns, whilst in a lower class were the thegns of the ealdorman or bishop.2 The dignity of thegn was closely (though not inseparably) connected with the possession of landed property; 3 so social status much so that the possession of a certain quantity of land ship of land. Came to be regarded as a foundation of nobility. The simple freeman who acquired five hides of land entered into the ranks of the thegnhood. For the position of ealdorman the possession of at least forty hides was necessary. This intimate connexion between social status and the ownership of large landed estates, which has continued with but slight modification down to our own times, may be traced even in the original institutions of our Teutonic ancestors: Agri. quos inter se secundum dignationem partiuntur*

Intimate connexion between

and owner

Effects of growth of the thegnhood.

The development of the comitatus, or thegnhood, had

The Staller (comes stabuli)=the Marshal (from old High German marah, horse, and scalh, servant). [Thorpe, n. to Lappenberg, A.-S. ii. 312.] 2 See Kemble, Saxons in England, i. ch. vii. on the Noble by Service.' 3 [In Scotland, to all appearance, at least between the 11th and 15th centuries, the Thane ranked below the Earl and the Baron. Several Thanedoms are traceable to a very late period in Scottish history. See E. W. Robertson, Scotland under her Early Kings; W. F. Skene, Celtic Scotland; and G. Burnett, Exchequer Rolls of Scotland (Scottish Record Series).—Ed.] 4 Tacit. Germ. c. xxvi.

very important effects. In the original Teutonic community, the monarchic and aristocratic elements were subordinate to the democratic element. The growth of the thegnhood, working in close alliance with the kingly power, which from motives of self-interest it was bound to support as the source of its own dignity, reversed this original relation. Thus the aristocratic and monarchic elements obtained a decided pre-eminence. Purely voluntary in its origin, service rapidly grew to be universally compulsory. It soon came to be regarded as a principle that every freeman, not being a hlaford, must be attached to some superior, to whom he was bound by fealty, and who, in return, was his legal protector and the guarantee for his good behaviour. The freeman had indeed the right of choosing the lord to whom he should, in technical language, commend himself; but if he failed to do so, his kindred were bound to present him to the shire court and name a lord for him. The lordless man was treated as a kind of outlaw, and might be seized like a robber by anyone who met him. Having once commended himself to some lord, the freeman was prohibited from exchanging into the service of another lord in another shire without the consent of the ealdorman of the shire which he was desirous of quitting. Thus, 'a new order of things,' says Kemble, was consummated, in which the honours and security of service became more anxiously desired than a needy and unsafe freedom; and the alods being finally surrendered, to be taken back as beneficia, under mediate lords, the foundations of the royal, feudal system were securely laid on every side.'

In one respect the absorption of eorldom into thegnhood Tae Ceorls. had a liberalising effect. The ceorl, who could never become an eorl, might become a thegn, and so attain a rank practically equivalent to that of eorl. Thus the caste distinction of birth was broken through. The ceorl who acquired five hides of land (about 600 acres), with a church and mansion of his own, acquired also, as we have seen, the

1 Kemble, Saxons in England, i. 184.

Ealdormen.

right to thegnhood. King Athelstan extended the privilege to the merchant who in his own vessel had made three voyages to foreign parts. This last was a remarkable exception, in favour of commerce, to the general polity of this period, in which the possession of land was almost essential to dignity and perfect freedom. On the whole, however, the ceorls as a class were probably depressed by the growth of the thegnhood. As there were degrees among the thegns, so among the ceorls there were various grades, according to the different relations in which they stood towards the hlafords, under whom they had placed themselves. Some had land, which again varied greatly in quantity; some were landless. The landless ceorl indeed was practically little better off than the slave, except that he might commend himself to any lord he pleased; but still all ceorls were freemen and capable of becoming gentlemen. They were 'law-worthy,' and the wer of the lowest ceorl was payable to his kindred, not to the lord, to whom the composition for the murder of a slave would have belonged. In the Domesday Survey the name of ceorl does not occur; but the class is mentioned under the names of liberi homines, socmanni, villani, bordarii, cottarii, and cotseti, indicating doubtless some peculiarity of service or tenure. They are always distinguished from the servi or serfs of the demesne. The socmen were probably ceorls who had acquired less than five hides of freehold land. They may be regarded as 'the root of a noble plant, the free socage tenants, or English yeomanry, whose independence has stamped with peculiar features both our constitution and our national character.' 2

Above the thegns in dignity were the Ealdormen. In the primitive patriarchal constitution the chief authority in

1 Freeman, Norman Conquest, i. 95-7. [Chapter iv. in Mr. J. F. Morgan's England under the Norman Occupation (Lond. 1858), entitled The Hall, the Church and the Peasantry, gives a graphic picture, from Domesday and other Records, of the condition of both thanes and ceorls at the time of the Norman Conquest.-ED.]

2 Hallam, Midd. Ages, ii. [274].

each tribe seems to have been naturally exercised, in times of peace, by the eldest member. Hence the chief of the tribe was emphatically called the caldorman. When the chiefs of the Teutonic settlers assumed the regal style, the title of ealdorman gradually became restricted in its signification. From the time of Egbert it denoted a magistrate or viceroy appointed by the King and his Witan, more especially the governor of a shire or large district. Under the Danish Kings in the 11th century, the title of ealdorman was generally supplanted by that of eorl or earl, as the official title of the governor of a shire or province.1

By this time the word eorl, in its original signification of gentle birth, had, as we have seen, itself been supplanted by thegn. From about the period of the Norman Conquest the title of ealdorman underwent a further restriction, and has survived to our days only as the designation of city and borough magistrates.

As the result alike of their almost entire monopoly of The Clergy learning and of the veneration, not unmixed with superstition, which the sacerdotal character inspired in the laity, the clergy, as a class, held a very high political and social status. The poorest priest ranked as a mass-thegn; the bishop was on a par with the ealdorman and presided with him in the shire-moot, and the archbishop was never valued, in the eye of the law, at less than an atheling, or member of the King's family. Whilst all laymen, even of

1 The title of corl occurs early in the laws of the Kentish kings (Laws of Ethelbert, xiii. xiv.), and was probably of Jutish origin, but its use as a substitute for ealdorman was borrowed from the Danish jarl.

[In Scotland, the title of Earl was no doubt of Scandinavian origin, and was accepted as the equivalent of the Celtic maormor (or mormaer, as Skene writes it). The Latin form was in each case Comes. The Seven Earls appear for several centuries to have been a constitutional body in the Scoto-Pictish kingdom. See E. W. Robertson, Scotland under her Early Kings, and Skene, Celtic Scotland.-ED.]

2 Lappenberg (England under the Anglo-Saxons, by Thorpe, ii. p. 322) suggests, as a further explanation of the high position of the Christian priesthood, the account given by Tacitus of the vast influence in secular affairs possessed by the Pagan German priesthood, in whom exclusively resided the power of life and death. 'Such a primitive influence tended, no doubt, greatly to facilitate the domination of the Roman papal church, and a part of their jurisdiction, the ordeals or so-called judgments of God, may have had their origin in the legal usages of the heathen priests.'