ingdoms 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
full mastery over the Britons along their western border. But once
masters of the Britons the Bernician Englishmen turned to conquer their
English neighbours to the south, the men of Deira, whose first King AElla
was now sinking to the grave. The struggle filled the foreign markets
with English slaves, and one of the most memorable stories in our history
shows us a group of such captives as they stood in the market-place at
Rome, it may be in the great Forum of Trajan, which still in its decay
recalled the glories of the Imperial City. Their white bodies, their fair
faces, their golden hair was noted by a deacon who passed by. "From what
country do these slaves come?" Gregory asked the trader who brought them.
The slave-dealer answered "They are English," or as the word ran in the
Lat