thegn or man of much importance, nor did he mean the lord of the estate, who was probably some bishop or abbot, but only a lesser thegn, the mediocris tainus of Knut's laws. In the Domesday returns relating to 1065 such lesser thegns are frequently mentioned. They occur most commonly on large ecclesiastical manors, their holdings being termed tainlands, and on them lay the burden of providing the military and other services due from the churches to the king. In the Rectitudines the thegn's duties are similar, the main ones specified being fyrdfæreld, burhbote and brygeweore, that is to say the well-known "trinoda necessitas" together with all other burdens arising at the king's ban, such as the provision of ship-service and coastguard service and the building of deer-hays for the king's use when he came into the district. Here then, we seem for the first time in our sources to meet with a definite military tenure, but it differed from the later knight's service in that the thegn fought on foot and not on horse-back, and performed his service on behalf of his lord's estate and not in respect of his own holding. As to the size of the thegn's holding, the Rectitudines are silent, but tell us that the thegn was worthy of his book-right. No doubt he was also, as his name implies, a "dear-born" man with a wergeld of 1200 shillings. We cannot, however, picture him as more than a petty squire, for in Domesday the assessment of the "tainland," though sometimes five hides or more, is often no more than one hide. It was not, however, always a compact tenement but might be made up of parcels lying in several villages.
Having described the "thegn," the author of the Rectitudines passes next to the ceorl class and sets before us three distinct grades, called respectively geneatas, geburas and cotsetlas. The differences between them were clearly in the main economic and not due to differences of legal status. In the eyes of the law all alike were twihyndemen, and had wergelds of 200 shillings. Even the cotsetlas, who were the poorest, paid their "hearthpennies" on Holy Thursday, "as every freeman should." What marked these grades off from one another was the nature of the dues which could be claimed from them by their lords. The cotsetlas or cottage tenants, having as a rule no plough-oxen, may probably be regarded as the lowest of the three in the social scale. They worked every Monday throughout the year for the lord on his inland, or demesne portion of the estate, and three days a week at harvest-time. They paid church-scot at Martinmas, but did not normally pay landgafol or rent in money. Their holdings in the arable fields were usually five acres more or less. Next in order in the village hierarchy came the geburas or boors, whose name itself, used as it is in most Germanic tongues for a peasant of any kind, and still familiar to us in a disguised form in the term "neighbour," seems to imply that they were the commonest and most widespread class[1]. To these tenants our author devotes about a quarter
- ↑ Maitland has contended that the geburas were only an insignificant class: cf. Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 329. But this opinion ignores the use of the derivative
