distinguished amidst all. Around each prelate, as stars round a sun,
were his own special priestly retainers, selected from his diocese.
Farther still down the hall are the great civil lords and viceking
vassals of the "Lord-Paramount." Vacant the chair of the King of the
Scots, for Siward hath not yet had his wish; Macbeth is in his
fastnesses, or listening to the weird sisters in the wold; and Malcolm is
a fugitive in the halls of the Northumbrian earl. Vacant the chair of
the hero Gryffyth, son of Llewelyn, the dread of the marches, Prince of
Gwyned, whose arms had subjugated all Cymry. But there are the lesser
sub-kings of Wales, true to the immemorial schisms amongst themselves,
which destroyed the realm of Ambrosius, and rendered vain the arm of
Arthur. With their torques of gold, and wild eyes, and hair cut round
ears and brow [87], they stare on the scene.

On the same bench with these sub-kings, distinguished from them by height
of stature, and calm collectedness of mien, no less than by their caps of
maintenance and furred robes, are those props of strong thrones and
terrors of weak--the earls to whom shires and counties fall, as hyde and
carricate to the lesser thegns. But three of these were then present,
and all three the foes of Godwin,--Siward, Earl of Northumbria; Leofric
of Mercia (that Leofric whose wife Godiva yet lives in ballad and song);
and Rolf, Earl of Hereford and Worcestershire, who, strong in his claim
of "king's blood," left not the court with his Norman friends. And on
the same benches, though a little apart, are the lesser earls, and that
higher order of thegns, called king's thegns.

Not far from these sat the chosen citizens from the free burgh of London,
already of great weight in the senate [88],--sufficing often to turn its
counsels; all friends were they of the English Earl and his house. In
the same division of the hall were found the bulk and true popular part
of the meeting--popular indeed--as representing not the people, but the
things the people most prized-valour and wealth; the thegn landowners,
called in the old deeds the "Ministers:" they sate with swords by their
side, all of varying birth, fortune, and connection, whether with king,
earl, or ceorl. For in the different districts of the old Heptarchy, the
qualification varied; high in East Anglia, low in Wessex; so that what
was wealth in the one shire was poverty in the other. There sate, half a
yeoman, the Saxo