Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/133

It is a strange and unexplained fact that in France and Germany nobility was somehow connected with freedom, that counts and barons and dukes were content to be classed among the liberi homines, and that francus or 'free' conveyed the same meaning as nobilis or gentilis; and the fact seems stranger still when we discover that these ideas were not confined to the continent, but can be traced in England also. Spelman asserts that the title of liber homo was once applied to nobles, for scarce any one beside was entirely free, and Maitland that 'in the Norman age we see traces of a usage which will not allow any one is "free," if he is not "noble."^[1] We know that several of the liberi homines mentioned in the Domesday Survey were lords of manors and men of high position. Even as late as the fourteenth century 'free' was used both in England and Scotland in the sense of 'noble, honourable, of gentle birth and breeding.'^[2] Thus in Chaucer's House of Fame we have^[3]—

His fader Anchises the free;

in Richard of Gloucester (1297)—

Of fayrost fourme and maners,
And mest gentyl and fre;^[4]

in the Legend of the Life of St, Alexius^[5]—

A yong man gent and fre;

and in Sir Ferumbras (c. 1380)^[6]—

As thou are gent and free.^[7]

In the old English romances knights are usually either 'gentil' or 'free.' Chaucer writes in The Monkes Tale—

He was of knyghthod and of fredam flour.

Minot, in his Songs of King Edward's Wars,^[8] has the lines—

The right aire of that cuntre
Es cumen with all his knightes fre
To schac him by the berd;

and in Caxton's Four Sons of Aymon^[9] the word occurs again in the same sense,—

They met wyth damp Rambault, the free knyght.

1. Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 106.
2. New English Dictionary.
3. i. 442.
4. 1724, 420.
5. E.E.T.S. (1878), p. 20.
6. Ibid. p. 27, line 646.
7. See also Weber's Metr. Rom. ii. 290.
8. Wright's Political Songs, i. 67.
9. ix. 199.