In looking over the pages of our early Anglo-Norman history we are at once struck by the fact of the absence of any middle class; that important branch of our community which in after and more civilised ages has done so much for English liberty and English strength. The whole genius of the feudal constitution was opposed to this. There was indeed a graduating scale of feudal tenure which bound together and connected each community; but there was of equal surety in the chain of these independent links of society a certain ring where all alliance ceased save that of service, and which separated each provincial society into two widely-sundered classes. On the one side were the baron and his nearer feudatories and retainers; and below this, on the other, came under one common standard the villein, the peasant, and the boor, looked upon by their superiors with contemptuous indifference, and barely endured as necessary to the administration of their luxury and pleasure. We have already mentioned many of those who gave the baron support. Of other his vassals we may cite ‘le Vavasour,’ or ‘Valvasor,’ a kind of middle-class landowner. The lower orders of chivalry have left us in our many ‘Knights’[186] and ‘Bachelors’ or ‘Backlers’ a plentiful token of former importance. Our ‘Squiers,’ ‘Squires,’ ‘Swiers,’ or ‘Swires’[187] carry us, as does the now meaningless Esquire, to the time when the sons of those ‘Knights’ bore, as the name implies, their shields. By the time of Henry VI., however, it had become adopted by the heirs of the higher gentry, and now it is used indiscriminately enough. Those who are so surnamed may comfort themselves at any rate with the reflection that they are lineally descended from those who bore the name when it was an honourable and distinctive title. ‘Armiger,’ the form in which the word was oftentimes recorded in our Latin rolls, still survives, though barely, in our ‘Armingers,’ this corrupted form being in perfect harmony with all similar instances, as we shall see almost immediately. One of our mediæval rhymes speaks of— Ten thousand knights stout and fers, Withouten hobelers and squyers. These hobelers are far from being uninteresting. When we talk of riding a hobby, we little think what a history is concealed beneath the term. A hobiler[188] in the days we are speaking of, was one who held by tenure of maintaining a hobbie—a kind of small horse, then familiarly so known. A song on the times, written in the fourteenth century, and complaining of the manner in which the upper classes plundered the poor, says:— And those hoblurs, namelich, That husband benimeth eri of ground, Men ne should them bury in none chirch, But cast them out as a hound.