But it is only indirectly that my subject has anything to do with the Feudal System, and especially with its social working. I have to do with the _comitatus_, out of which the feudal relation grew, mainly in another aspect equally indirect, namely, the way in which it affected our earliest political institutions. It gave us a new form of nobility, a nobility of office and of personal relation to the King, instead of a nobility founded on birth only. It gave us a nobility of _Thegns_, which gradually supplanted the earlier nobility of the _Eorls_. As the royal power and dignity grew, it came to be looked on as the highest honour to enter into the personal service of the King. Two results followed; service towards the King, a place, that is, in the King’s _comitatus_, became the badge and standard of nobility(60). And it greatly strengthened the power of the King that he stood to all the chief men of his kingdom in the relation, not only of a political ruler, but of a personal lord, a lord to whose service they were bound by a personal tie, and of whom they held their lands as the gift of his personal bounty. It marks perhaps a decline from the first idea of the _comitatus_ that the old word _Gesith_, _companion_, answering exactly to the Latin _Comes_ used by Tacitus, was supplanted by the name _Thegn_, literally _servant_(61). But when personal service was deemed honourable, the name of servant was no degradation, and the name _Thegn_ became equivalent to the older _Eorl_. The King’s Thegn, the men who held their land of the King and who were bound to him by the tie of personal service, formed the highest class of nobility. The Thegns of inferior lords, of Bishops and Ealdormen, formed a secondary class. A nobility of this kind, there can be no doubt, was so far more liberal than the elder nobility of birth that admission to it was not forbidden to men of lower degree. The _Ceorl_, the ordinary freeman, could not in strictness become an _Eorl_, for the simple reason that he could not change his forefathers; but he might, and he often did, become a _Thegn_(62). But, on the other hand, such a nobility, while it made it easier for the common freeman to rise, tended to lower the condition of the common freemen who did not rise. For the very reason that the barrier of birth is one which cannot be passed, it is in some respects less irksome than the barrier of wealth or office. The privileges of a strictly hereditary nobility are much more likely to sink into mere honorary distinctions than the privileges of a nobility whose rank is backed by the solid advantages of office and of a personal relation to the sovereign.