the border;” a custom which was retained side by side with the military service of the feudal system, under the name of “Scottish service,” rendering an army thus levied, and armed only with weapons of offence, more numerous indeed, but far less effective, than the well-equipped body of mail-clad men-at-arms, who were bound by the tenure of “knight-service” to follow their lord to the field. Wherever the adoption of the benefice had introduced the principle of stated military service, the representatives of the earlier freemen had invariably sunk into a class of agricultural peasantry, free, but occupying an intermediate station between the noble and the læt or serf. The soldier, for instance, amongst the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century was exclusively represented by the Thane, whilst the member of the _folk_ or people was only required to attend the army in the capacity of a camp follower, unarmed and without either the duties or responsibilities of a fighting man.[277] No such intermediate class is traceable amongst the Celts of this period, who had not yet, apparently, entered upon that stage of society in which the noble rose out from amongst the ranks of the free, as a member of a distinct and separate caste. The equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon Ceorl--the Boneddig or Bonnacht--continued to rank amongst the lesser _Duine-Uasal_ who lived by the sword, and whilst the title of _Churl_ has passed into an opprobrious epithet in the English language, the candidate for a Welsh county still esteems it an act of courtesy to address his constituency as _Boneddigion_ or “gentlemen.” A wide, and in most cases apparently an all but impassable barrier, separated the _Duine-Uasal_ from the agricultural population connected with the land, a class which may be said, in a general way, to have comprised all who were not connected by blood with the _Duchasach_ of the district, answering to the _Attach Tuatha_ or _Daer-Clans_ amongst the Irish, and the _Alltudion_ and earlier _Lætic_ population--the _Wealh_--amongst the Welsh and Germans. Captives and criminals formed the absolutely servile class, for, to judge from the Welsh laws, the _alien_ enjoyed a certain degree of freedom, being at liberty to change his residence as long as it was equally in the power of his lord to remove him from his land; though after a lapse of three generations in one locality, the fourth in descent acquired a permanent right to remain in the ancestral dwelling, with a claim to subsistence in that district from which he was now irremovable. No fixity of tenure was acquired by such a claim, which was simply a right to receive every year from the _maor_ or steward of the Tighern a shifting allotment, representing literally the yearly assignment of land alluded to in the descriptions of Cæsar and Tacitus; and at the opening of the fourteenth century the agricultural population throughout Scotland, as a class, still held their farms by a yearly