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These savings we gave up for our Earl, and when the Earl came back, he gave the sixhaendman hides of land enow to make him a thegn; and he gave the ceorls who hade holpen Clapa, their freedom and broad shares of his boc-land, and most of them now hold their own ploughs and feed their own herds. And so I have risen, as with us ceorls can rise."
Hereditary right seems to have been unknown. The essence of feudalism WAS A LIFE ESTATE, the land reverted either to the sovereign or to the people upon the death of the occupant. King Alfred the Great bequeathed "his BOC-LAND to his nearest relative; and if any of them have children it is more agreeable to me that it go to those born on the male side."
"Marvels!" cried the Norman. "But surely they bear a stain and stigma, and their fellow-thegns flout them?" "Not a whit why so? land is land, money money. Little, I trow, care we what a man's father may have been, if the man himself hath his ten hides or more of good boc-land." "Ye value land and the moneys," said the Norman, "so do we, but we value more name and birth."
The consolidation of the sovereignty, the extension of laws of forfeiture, the assumption by the kings of the rights of the popular assemblies, all tended to the formation of a second set of titles, and BOC-LAND became an object of ambition. The same individual appears to have held land by both titles, and to have had greater powers over the latter than over the former.
These savings we gave up for our Earl, and when the Earl came back, he gave the sixhaendman hides of land enow to make him a thegn; and he gave the ceorls who hade holpen Clapa, their freedom and broad shares of his boc-land, and most of them now hold their own ploughs and feed their own herds. And so I have risen, as with us ceorls can rise."
"Marvels!" cried the Norman. "But surely they bear a stain and stigma, and their fellow-thegns flout them?" "Not a whit why so? land is land, money money. Little, I trow, care we what a man's father may have been, if the man himself hath his ten hides or more of good boc-land." "Ye value land and the moneys," said the Norman, "so do we, but we value more name and birth."
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