United States or Bhutan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The great inquest of all, the Domesday survey, may owe its principle to a foreign source; the oath of the reporters may be Norman, but the machinery that furnishes the jurors is native; "the king's barons inquire by the oath of the sheriff of the shire, and of all the barons and their Frenchmen, and of the whole hundred, the priest, the reeve, and six ceorls of every township."
Rolf smiled, as if pleased with a compliment which simpler men might have deemed, at the best, equivocal, and replied: "It is true, my liege; and gramercy, the air of England sharpens the scent; for in this villein and motley country, made up of all races, Saxon and Fin, Dane and Fleming, Pict and Walloon, it is not as with us, where the brave man and the pure descent are held chief in honour: here, gold and land are, in truth, name and lordship; even their popular name for their national assembly of the Witan is, 'The Wealthy. He who is but a ceorl to-day, let him be rich, and he may be earl to-morrow, marry in king's blood, and rule armies under a gonfanon statelier than a king's; while he whose fathers were ealdermen and princes, if, by force or by fraud, by waste or by largess, he become poor, falls at once into contempt, and out of his state, sinks into a class they call 'six-hundred men, in their barbarous tongue, and his children will probably sink still lower, into ceorls.
"Bold man, thou spokest of Harold the Earl and his harvests; knowest thou not that his lands have passed from him, and that he is outlawed, and that his harvests are not for the scythes of his ceorls to reap?" "May it please you, dread Lord and King," replied the Saxon simply, "these lands that were Harold the Earl's, are now Clapa's, the sixhaendman's."
And, if the King remains as aloof as now from his royal kinsman, Edward the Atheling, who" the Earl hesitated and looked round "who so near to the throne when I am no more, as Harold, the joy of the ceorls, and the pride of the thegns? he whose tongue never falters in the Witan, and whose arm never yet hath known defeat in the field?" Githa's heart swelled, and her cheek grew flushed.
The stranger drew his sword and wounded him; blows followed the stranger fell by the arm he had provoked. The news arrives to Earl Eustace; he and his kinsmen spur to the spot; they murder the Englishman on his hearth-stone. Here a groan, half-stifled and wrathful, broke from the ceorls at the end of the hall. Godwin held up his hand in rebuke of the interruption, and resumed.
At length one of the ceorls came riding in to say that the Bishop, with his retinue, was approaching the village, and Father Cuthbert went out to meet him. The impatient anxiety of poor Elfric became painful to witness. "He is coming, Elfric! he is coming!" said Alfred from the window. "I see him near; see! he stops to salute Father Cuthbert, whom he knew years ago; I must go down to receive him.
We belong to a land where men are valued for what they are, not for what their dead ancestors might have been. So has it been for ages in Saxon England, where my fathers, through Godwin, as thou sayest, might have been ceorls; and so, I have heard, it is in the land of the martial Danes, where my fathers, through Githa, reigned on the thrones of the North."
The stranger drew his sword and wounded him; blows followed the stranger fell by the arm he had provoked. The news arrives to Earl Eustace; he and his kinsmen spur to the spot; they murder the Englishman on his hearth-stone. Here a groan, half-stifled and wrathful, broke from the ceorls at the end of the hall. Godwin held up his hand in rebuke of the interruption, and resumed.
"So have I heard," said the Saxon, chuckling; "I have heard, indeed, that ye thegns, or great men, are free enow, and plainspoken. But what of the commons the sixhaendmen and the ceorls, master Norman? Dare they speak as we speak of king and of law, of thegn and of captain?"
I left my ceorls and horses on the other side the river, and must go after them.
Word Of The Day