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Updated: June 11, 2025
After the withdrawal of the Romans, Northumbria became planted by immigrant Saxons from North Germany and Norsemen from Scandinavia, whose Eorls or Earls made Newcastle their principal seat. Then came the Normans, from whose New Castle, built some eight hundred years since, the town derived its present name.
Having done what he could to protect his dominion from sudden attacks, Alfred then turned his attention to the reorganization of his army and navy. Strictly speaking he had no regular army, or standing force, which he could call his own. When the country was threatened the freemen flew to arms, under their eorls and ealdormen; and on this force the king was obliged to rely.
The old eorls and ealdormen were warriors; and yet to them had been committed the administration of justice, which they often abused, frequently deciding cases against the verdicts of jurors, and sometimes unjustly dooming innocent men to capital punishment. Alfred hanged an ealdorman or alderman, one Freberne, for sentencing Haspin to death when the jury was in doubt.
The king's thegns were his body-guard, the one force ever ready to carry out his will. They were his nearest and most constant counsellors. As the gathering of petty tribes into larger kingdoms swelled the number of eorls in each realm, and in a corresponding degree diminished their social importance, it raised in equal measure the rank of the king's thegns.
It was the gradual transfer of a whole German nation from the Elbe and Rhine to the Thames and the Humber, with their original village institutions, under the rule of their eorls, with the simple addition of kings, unknown in their original settlements, but brought about by the necessities which military life and conquest produced.
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