170 BARONY AND THAN AGE ■ April Hcnrici ' (c. 1115) not only do we have the phrase ' thaini uel baronis ',• but * thainus ' is constantly used where we might expect baro. Before Henry I's death, however, baro seems to have ousted all its rivals ; and in the late * Leges Edwardi Confcssoris ' (c. 1130-5) we find it consistently used as the equivalent of ' thegn '} ' Thegn ', however, was a word of wide application. Used first to denote a freeman serving in the household of a lord — the king or another — and then to denote a freeman endowed with land in return for personal service, usually, though not always, armed service, * thegn ' had by the beginning of the eleventh century become a term of wide use, covering men who owned their land so freely that they could go with it to any lord they pleased, and men whose land remained with the lord from whom they held it ; men who held by military service, and men who held by such humble service as sending their men to help in reaping the king's corn ; men who held vast estates in which they had wide powers or jurisdiction, and men who had but a single ploughland, perhaps held in parage with five or six others.^ It was, nevertheless, inevitable that some distinction should be drawn between men so far apart in rank and power as were the great thane who ruled a whole hundred and the humble thane who rode in the king's army or on his errands, and helped to plough his land and reap his corn. In Cnut's Laws (1027-35) this distinction is clearly drawn in the well-known chapter regulating heriots (c. 71). According to this, the heriot of a king's thane was just half that of an earl and nearly four times that of the ' mean ' thane,^ who had to give a horse and his trappings together with his arms, unless he had not so much, in which case he gave his ' healsfang ' (i. e. neck-money), of 1205. in Wessex, 40s. in Mcrcia and East Anglia ; but in the Danelaw the king's thane who had his ' soc ' gave only £4, that is, double the heriot of the * mean ' thane, unless he was also known to the king, when he gave half the heriot of a king's thane in Wessex and Mercia. Now, the distinction drawn here between king's thanes and ' mean ' thanes cannot be, as some have thought, between^ thanes who hold of the king and thanes who do not. For Domes- day Book shows us many thanes holding of the king whose heriot is but a horse and his trappings, or even the 405. due from the
- mean ' thane who had not so much.* These were indeed ' lesser
- See these texts in Liebermann, Die Oesetze der Angelsachsen, i.
- Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 161 ff.
' Henry VIII frequently used the phrase ' mean man ' to denote a man of moderate fortune and station in life ; it exactly translates ' raedume', 'moderate '.
- e. g. in Berkshire, Lancashire, and Cheshire ; Domesday Book, i. 56 b, 269, 270 a.
Cf. the radcnihts of Gloucestershire ; ibid. i. 163.
