94 THE ANCESTOR The adjective 'free' might be applied to higher personages than knights. In the romance of Richard Cceur de Lion (before 1300)^ we hear of 'barouns free/ in ^ir Gawayne^ (1320-30) of a 'free lorde/ in William of Palerne (c. 1340) of a ' fre quene/ and in Sir Ferumhras ^ of a ' kyng y-crouned free/ In the Legends of the Holy Rood the Virgin Mary is spoken of as ' Oure ladi freo/ and in the Touneley play of Noah and his Ark^ God is referred to as 'that fre/ ' Free ' is also used as a substantive to denote a ' person of noble birth or breeding, a knight or lady/^ Chaucer in his Compleint to his Lady ^ speaks of a ' goodly free/ and in the English ver- sion of the Song of Roland ^ (1350-1400)5 there is the line — Though every fre wer aferid, fle will we never. In the phrase ' gent and fre/ or ' gentyl and fre/ of the use of which I might have quoted a score of other instances, we have a curious parallel to the franc et gentil of the French romances and the liher vel nobilis of the German chronicle. According to Selden, the ' Freye vom Adel ^ ' was free from taxes and subject to no court but the emperor's, and it might have been supposed that the French nobles were franci in the sense that they were free from taxes and tallages, and that the Saxon thanes were ' freo ' in the sense that no one but the king had jurisdiction over them.^ But this theory cannot be maintained. In Germany, as I understand, many who did not hold immediately of the emperor were known as ' freyen ' and ' freyherren,' and throughout Europe all tenants in feodo^ small as well as great, were free from tribute and taxes. The English phrase ' gentyl and free ' cannot be merely an adaptation from the French, for in the old English tongue ' free ' was used hundreds of years before the Norman conquest to express nobility and even dominion over others. In the supplement to Alfric's vocabulary, liheri is translated as ' freobearn, vel aethelborene cild.' ^ In the rules of St. Benedict, ' freoh ' is used for ingenuus^ qui sui juris est^ and in the Lambeth Psalter ' frearecceras ' for domini principes}^ In the poetic paraphrase of the Doxology, made, it is supposed, in the eighth century, 1 Weber, ii. 50. 2 E.E.T.S. ^ p. 18, line 466.
- New English Dictionary. ^103. ^ E.E.T.S. (1880), p. 124.
Titks of Honour, p. 855, 425. ^ Hey wood, On Distinctions in Society (1818), p. 162. 9 Wright's Vocab. 173, 23. 1^ Lye's Saxon Diet. (1772).
