dependence as distinguished from the warrior’s general duty to the folk at large was embodied in the thegn.  “Chieftains fight for victory,” says Tacitus; “comrades for their chieftain.”  When one of Beowulf’s “comrades” saw his lord hard bested “he minded him of the homestead he had given him, of the folk right he gave him as his father had it; nor might he hold back then.”  Snatching up sword and shield he called on his fellow-thegns to follow him to the fight.  “I mind me of the day,” he cried, “when we drank the mead, the day we gave pledge to our lord in the beer hall as he gave us these rings, our pledge that we would pay him back our war-gear, our helms and our hard swords, if need befel him.  Unmeet is it, methinks, that we should bear back our shields to our home unless we guard our lord’s life.”  The larger the band of such “comrades,” the more power and repute it gave their lord.  It was from among the chiefs whose war-band was strongest that the leaders of the host were commonly chosen; and as these leaders grew into kings, the number of their thegns naturally increased.  The rank of the “comrades” too rose with the rise of their lord.  The king’s thegns were his body-guard, the one force ever ready to carry out his will.  They were his nearest and most constant counsellors.  As the gathering of petty tribes into larger kingdoms swelled the number of eorls in each realm, and in a corresponding degree diminished their social importance, it raised in equal measure the rank of the king’s thegns.  A post among them was soon coveted and won by the greatest and noblest in the land.  Their service was rewarded by exemption from the general jurisdiction of hundred-court or shire-court, for it was part of a thegn’s meed for his service that he should be judged only by the lord he served.  Other meed was found in grants of public land which made them a local nobility, no longer bound to actual service in the king’s household or the king’s war-band, but still bound to him by personal ties of allegiance far closer than those which bound an eorl to the chosen war-leader of his tribe.  In a word, thegnhood contained within itself the germ of that later feudalism which was to battle so fiercely with the Teutonic freedom out of which it grew.

[Sidenote:  The Bernicians]

But the strife between the conquering tribes which at once followed on their conquest of Britain was to bring about changes even more momentous in the development of the English people.  While Jute and Saxon and Engle were making themselves masters of central and southern Britain, the English who had landed on its northernmost shores had been slowly winning for themselves the coast district between the Forth and the Tyne which bore the name of Bernicia.  Their progress seems to have been small till they were gathered into a kingdom in 547 by Ida the “Flame-bearer,” who found a site for his King’s town on the impregnable rock of Bamborough; nor was it till the reign of his fourth son AEthelric that they gained