Among free men there were two kinds of difference. A man might be a lord having dependents, protecting them and in turn supported by them, and answerable in some measure for their conduct; or he might be a free man of small estate dependent on a lord. In the tenth century, if not before, every man who was not a lord himself was bound to have a lord on pain of being treated as unworthy of a free man’s rights; “lordless man” was to Anglo-Saxon ears much the same as “rogue and vagabond” to ours. This wide-spread relation of lord and man was one of the elements that in due time went to make up feudalism. It was not necessarily associated with any holding of land by the man from the lord, but the association was doubtless already common a long time before the Conquest, and there is every reason to think that the legally uniform class of dependent free men included many varieties of wealth and prosperity. Many were probably no worse off than substantial farmers, and many not much better than slaves. The other legal difference between free men was their estimation for _wergild_, the “man’s price” which a man’s kinsfolk were entitled to demand from his slayer, and which sometimes he might have to pay for his own offences; and this was the more important because the weight of a man’s oath also varied with it. A _thegn_ (which would be more closely represented by “gentilhomme” than by “nobleman”) had a wergild six times as great as a _ceorl’s_[46] or common man’s, and his oath counted for six common oaths before the court.[47] All free men, noble or simple, looked to their kindred as their natural helpers and avengers; and one chief office of early criminal law was to regulate the blood-feud until there was a power strong enough to supersede it.