critic good-humouredly exclaims, "We have a full attendance of thegns
and cnehts, but we should have liked much better our old friends and
approved good masters thanes and knights." Nothing could be more
apposite for my justification than the instances here quoted in censure;
nothing could more plainly vindicate the necessity of employing the Saxon
words. For I should sadly indeed have misled the reader if I had used
the word knight in an age when knights were wholly unknown to the
Anglo-Saxon and cneht no more means what we understand by knight, than a
templar in modern phrase means a man in chain mail vowed to celibacy, and
the redemption of the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the Mussulman.
While, since thegn and thane are both archaisms, I prefer the former; not
only for the same reason that induces Sir Francis Palgrave to prefer it,
viz., because it is the more etymologically correct; but because we take
from our neighbours the Scotch, not only the word thane, but the sense in
which we apply it; and that sense is not the same that we ought to attach
to the various and complicated notions of nobility which the Anglo-Saxon
comprehended in the title of thegn. It has been peremptorily said by
more than one writer in periodicals, that I have overrated the erudition
of William, in permitting him to know Latin; nay, to have read the
Comments of Caesar at the age of eight.--Where these gentlemen find the
authorities to confute my statement I know not; all I know is, that in
the statement I have followed the original authorities usually deemed the
best. And I content myself with referring the disputants to a work not
so difficult to procure as (and certainly more pleasant to read than) the
old Chronicles. In Miss Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England,"
(Matilda of Flanders,) the same statement is made, and no doubt upon the
same authorities.

More surprised should I be (if modern criticism had not taught me in all
matter's of assumption the nil admirari), to find it alleged that I have
overstated not only the learning of the Norman duke, but that which
flourished in Normandy under his reign; for I should have thought that
the fact of the learning which sprung up in the most thriving period of
that principality; the rapidity of its growth; the benefits it derived
from Lanfranc; the encouragement it received from William, had been
phenomena too remarkable in the annals of the age, and in the history of
literature,