Note O. p. . Growth of the Thegnhood

I cannot forbear transcribing the passage in which Mr. Kemble (Saxons in England, i. 183) sums up the general results of the growth of the Thegnhood. “As the royal power steadily advanced by his assistance, and the old, national nobility of birth, as well as the old, landed freeman sunk into a lower rank, the gesið found himself rising in power and consideration proportioned to that of his chief: the offices which had passed from the election of the freemen to the gift of the crown, were now conferred upon him, and the ealdorman, duke, geréfa, judge, and even the bishop, were at length selected from the ranks of the comitatus. Finally, the nobles by birth themselves became absorbed in the ever-widening whirlpool; day by day the freemen, deprived of their old national defences, wringing with difficulty a precarious subsistence from incessant labour, sullenly yielded to a yoke which they could not shake off, and commended themselves (such was the phrase) to the protection of a lord; till a complete change having thus been operated in the opinions of men, and consequently in every relation of society, a new order of things 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.”

The supplanting of an older by a newer form of nobility has several parallels in history. The distinction between patricii and nobiles at Rome has some analogies to the distinction between eorlas and þegnas in England. The plebeian could not become patrician, but he could become noble; and this plebeian nobility, derived from the possession of curule magistracies, answered to our thegnhood in being a nobility of office, though in this case it was office conferred by the people and not by a King or other lord. See more in Comparative Politics, 246–270. On the growth of the official comitatus in the courts of the Frankish Kings and Emperors see the chapter of Waitz (iii. 410), “Der Hof und die Reichsversammlung.” He comments on the difference between this and the earlier comitatus; but both are instances of the same principle. See also iv. 278 of the same work, “Dabei wird immer auch auf Abstammung, Ansehn des Geschlechtes Werth gelegt; aber ein bestimmter rechtlicher Vorzug war damit nicht verbunden.” He has collected a great number of cases of the use of the word nobilis and other equivalent words in the Carolingian age, that is to say, just at the point when the old notion of nobility had come to an end and when the new one had not fully developed itself. In that immediate stage nobility means simply to have meant free birth, or at all events free birth combined with the possession of land.