238 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



so ; that is, that all persons who were not ceorls or peasants 

 (the accepted meaning of villanus) were comites — a use of comes 

 which is certainly inconsistent with any accepted meaning of 

 this word. It is still more to the purpose to note that tliegn is 

 joined with ceorl in precisely this same way (Ord. resp. the 

 Dun-saetas, 5); and the inadequacy of the argument is proved 

 by noticing that in Ethelred's Law thrall and thegn are joined, 

 exactly as ceoi-l and earl are. I^ow a thrall was a slave ; and 

 it certainly was not true that all who were not slaves were 

 thegns. The coupling o^ earl and ceorl is easiest explained by 

 the jingle, as that of thrall and thegyi is by the alliteration. 

 It may be noticed too that the Norsemen made use of precisely 

 the same jingle— jar/ar ok Jcarlar. As to the explicit state- 

 ment (Eih. vii, 2) that a ceorl might become an earl, Mr. Free- 

 man is obliged, in consistency with his view of the strictly 

 hereditary rank of the earl, to question the correctness of the 

 statement. " I may remark that the jingle of beginnings and 

 endings has carried the lawgiver a little too far. In strictness 

 the Ceorl could not become an Earl (in the older sense of the 

 word.)' 



When we leave these four passages, we find that the use of 

 the word Earl in the ninth and tenth centuries is perfectly 

 consistent with what we find in the sixth. It is usually as. 

 sumed that the later use of Earl as a governor of several coun- 

 ties was introduced by Cnut; and it is certain that Cnut did 

 reorganize the kingdom and establish a new grade of governor 

 with this title. It is no less certain, however, that even before 

 his time the word was frequently used to designate magistrates, 

 as equivalent to ealdorman, (see Bosworth, Anglo-Saxon Dic- 

 tionary, s. v.), and that this use occurs even in legal docu- 

 ments. In the Laws of Edward and Guthram (12) we find : 

 " If any man wrong an ecclesiastic or a foreigner, then shall 

 the king, or the earl there in the land, and the bishop of the 

 people, be unto him in the place of a kinsman and of a pro- 



* Norm. Conq. i. p. 95, n. 1. 



