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Thegn
In later Anglo-Saxon England, a thegn or thane (Latin minister) was an aristocrat who ranked at the third level in lay society, below the king and ealdormen. He had to be a substantial landowner. Thanage refers to the tenure by which lands were held by a thane as well as the rank; an approximately equivalent modern title may be that of baron. The term ''thane'' was also used in Early Middle Ages, early medieval Scandinavia for a class of retainers, and ''thane (Scotland), thane'' was a title given to local royal officials in medieval eastern Scotland, equivalent in rank to the child of an earl. Etymology ''Thegn'' is only used once in the laws before the reign of King Æthelstan (924–939), but more frequently in charters. Apparently unconnected to the German language, German and Dutch language, Dutch word '' '' ('to serve'), H. M. Chadwick suggests "the sense of subordination must have been inherent... from the earliest time". It gradually expanded in meaning and use, to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Anglo-Saxons
The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a Cultural identity, cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to Germanic peoples, Germanic settlers who became one of the most important cultural groups in Britain by the 5th century. The Anglo-Saxon period in Britain is considered to have started by about 450 and ended in 1066, with the Norman conquest of England, Norman Conquest. Although the details of Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, their early settlement and History of Anglo-Saxon England, political development are not clear, by the 8th century an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity which was generally called had developed out of the interaction of these settlers with the existing Romano-British culture. By 1066, most of the people of what is now England spoke Old English, and were considered English. Viking and Norman invasions chang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Earl
Earl () is a rank of the nobility in the United Kingdom. In modern Britain, an earl is a member of the Peerages in the United Kingdom, peerage, ranking below a marquess and above a viscount. A feminine form of ''earl'' never developed; instead, ''countess'' is used. The title originates in the Old English word , meaning "a man of noble birth or rank". The word is cognate with the Old Norse, Scandinavian form ''jarl''. After the Norman Conquest, it became the equivalent of the continental count. In Scotland, it assimilated the concept of mormaer. Since the 1960s, earldoms have typically been created only for members of the British royal family, royal family. The last non-royal earldom, Earl of Stockton, was created in 1984 for Harold Macmillan, prime minister from 1957 to 1963. Alternative names for the rank equivalent to "earl" or "count" in the nobility structure are used in other countries, such as the ''hakushaku'' (伯爵) of the post-restoration Japanese Imperial era. Et ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Beowulf - Ge Sithum
''Beowulf'' (; ) is an Old English poem, an epic in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature. The date of composition is a matter of contention among scholars; the only certain dating is for the manuscript, which was produced between 975 and 1025 AD. Scholars call the anonymous author the "''Beowulf'' poet". The story is set in pagan Scandinavia in the 5th and 6th centuries. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall Heorot has been under attack by the monster Grendel for twelve years. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother takes revenge and is in turn defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland and becomes king of the Geats. Fifty years later, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is mortally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants cremate his body and erect a barrow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Thane (Scotland)
Thane (; ) was the title given to a local royal official in medieval eastern Scotland, equivalent in rank to the son of an earl, who was at the head of an administrative and socio-economic unit known as a thanedom or thanage. History The earliest documentary record of a thane is in the written judgement of a land dispute settled at a provincial assembly of Fife between 1128 and 1136, at which one attendee is described as the thane of Falkland. A further eleven thanes are recorded over the course of the rest of the 12th century, attached to estates from East Lothian to Moray, all of which were at the time under the control of the King of Alba. From around the beginning of the 13th century a few thanes also start to be documented attached to estates under the control of earls, including Dunning and Strowan, which both lay within the Earldom of Strathearn. A statute of 1221 explicitly allowed that some thanes could be responsible to an earl rather than the king, though the o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Slavery In Britain
Slavery in Britain existed before the Roman Britain, Roman occupation, which occurred from approximately AD 43 to AD 410, and the practice endured in various forms until the 11th century, during which the Norman Conquest, Norman conquest of England resulted in the gradual merger of the pre-conquest institution of slavery into serfdom in the midst of other Economy, economic upheavals. Given the widespread socio-political changes afterwards, slaves were no longer treated differently from other individuals in either English law or formal custom. By the middle of the 12th century, the institution of slavery as it had existed prior to the Norman conquest had fully disappeared, but other forms of unfree servitude continued for some centuries. British merchants were a significant force behind the Atlantic slave trade (also known as the "transatlantic" slave trade) between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, but no legislation was ever passed in England that legalised slavery. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Celtic Britons
The Britons ( *''Pritanī'', , ), also known as Celtic Britons or Ancient Britons, were the Celtic people who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age until the High Middle Ages, at which point they diverged into the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons (among others). They spoke Common Brittonic, the ancestor of the modern Brittonic languages. The earliest written evidence for the Britons is from Greco-Roman writers and dates to the Iron Age. Ancient Britain was made up of many tribes and kingdoms, associated with various hillforts. The Britons followed an ancient Celtic religion overseen by druids. Some of the southern tribes had strong links with mainland Europe, especially Gaul and Belgica, and minted their own coins. The Roman Empire conquered most of Britain in the 1st century AD, creating the province of Britannia. The Romans invaded northern Britain, but the Britons and Caledonians in the north remained unconquered, and Hadrian's Wall became the edge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Late Antique Little Ice Age
The Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was a long-lasting Northern Hemispheric cooling period in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, during the period known as Late Antiquity. The period coincides with three large volcanic eruptions in 535/536, 539/540 and 547. The volcanic winter of 536 was the early phenomenon of the century-long global temperature decline. One study suggested a global cooling of . The period contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire and influenced the second wave migration period, primarily of the early Slavs. Term The term and concept were first coined and described in February 2016, in the '' Nature Geoscience'' article titled "Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD" by Ulf Büntgen, et al. Eruptions The existence of a cooling period was proposed as a theory in 2015, and subsequently confirmed as the period from AD 536 to about 660. Volcanic eruptions, meteorites striking the Earth's surface, and come ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Plague Of Justinian
The plague of Justinian or Justinianic plague (AD 541–549) was an epidemic of Plague (disease), plague that afflicted the entire Mediterranean basin, Mediterranean Basin, Europe, and the Near East, especially the Sasanian Empire and the Byzantine Empire. The plague is named for the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) who, according to his Court (royal), court historian Procopius, contracted the disease and recovered in 542, at the height of the epidemic which killed about a fifth of the population in the imperial capital Constantinople, Constantinople. The contagion arrived in Roman Egypt in 541, spread around the Mediterranean Sea until 544, and persisted in Northern Europe and the Arabian Peninsula until 549. By 543, the plague had spread to every corner of the empire. The plague's severity and impact remain debated. Some scholars assert that as the first episode of the first plague pandemic, it had profound economic, social, and political effects across Europe an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Law Of Æthelberht
The Law of Æthelberht is a set of legal provisions written in Old English, probably dating to the early 7th century. It originates in the kingdom of Kent, and is the first Germanic-language law code. It is also thought to be the earliest example of a document written in English, or indeed in any form of a surviving Germanic language, though extant only in an early 12th-century manuscript, '' Textus Roffensis''. The code is concerned primarily with preserving social harmony through compensation and punishment for personal injury, typical of Germanic-origin legal systems. Compensations are arranged according to social rank, descending from king to slave. The initial provisions of the code offer protection to the church. Though the latter were probably innovations, much of the remainder of the code may be derived from earlier legal custom transmitted orally. Manuscript, editions and translations There is only one surviving manuscript of Æthelberht's law, '' Textus Roffensis' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Eorl , in the Proto-Norse language
{{Disambiguation ...
Eorl may refer to: * Eorl Crabtree (born 1982), an English rugby league player * an Anglo-Saxon title of nobility, see Earl See also * Cirion and Eorl (or ''Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan''), one of the ''Unfinished Tales'' by J. R. R. Tolkien * Erilaz ''Erilaz'' or ''Erilaʀ'' is a Migration period Proto-Norse word attested on various Elder Futhark inscriptions, which has often been interpreted to mean " magician" or "rune master",* i.e., one who is capable of writing runes to magical effect. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Churl
A churl ( Old High German ), in its earliest Old English (Anglo-Saxon) meaning, was simply "a man" or more particularly a "free man", but the word soon came to mean "a non-servile peasant", still spelled , and denoting the lowest rank of freemen. According to the '' Oxford English Dictionary'', it later came to mean the opposite of nobility and royalty, "a common person". Says Chadwick: This meaning held through the 15th century, but by then the word had taken on negative overtones, meaning "a country person" and then "a low fellow". By the 19th century, a new and pejorative meaning arose, "one inclined to uncivil or loutish behaviour"—hence "churlish" (cf. the pejorative sense of the term ''boor'', whose original meaning of "country person" or "farmer" is preserved in Dutch and Afrikaans and German , although the latter has its own pejorative connotations such as those prompting its use as the name for the chess piece known in English as a pawn; also the word villain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Comes
''Comes'' (plural ''comites''), translated as count, was a Roman title, generally linked to a comitatus or comital office. The word ''comes'' originally meant "companion" or "follower", deriving from "''com-''" ("with") and "''ire''" ("go"). The special lasting meaning derives from the position of a follower within a ''comitatus'', which was a retinue, or group of followers, such as those of magnates. In some instances these were sufficiently large and/or formal to justify specific denomination, such as a "''cohors amicorum''". The word ''comes'' is the origin of the much later terms for counts within the medieval nobility, and counties as their territorial jurisdictions. Ancient Roman religion ''Comes'' was a common epithet or title that was added to the name of a hero or god in order to denote relation with another god. The coinage of Constantine I (emperor), Roman Emperor Constantine I declared him "''comes''" to Sol Invictus ("Unconquered Sun") ''qua'' god. Imperial Ro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
