The amount of _wergild_ was elaborately proportioned to the station in society of the injured party--twice as high for the nobleman as for the squire, three times as high for the squire as for the yeoman (if one may be permitted to use as a very rough approximation the terms current in modern society); but it is important to remember that obligation in this system of law went hand in hand with privilege. If the _wer_ for an injured thegn was high, it was on the level of that wer that he would have to atone to the king for offences committed by him against the law of the land.[104] The _wergild_ tariff, however, though frequently referred to, is not regularly set forth in the laws either of Ethelbert or of Ine, an omission common to it with many of the other Teutonic codes, especially that of the Lombards. Probably the amount of _wer_ payable in each case was so well known through long usage that the legislator deemed it needless to set it forth anew, but it is possible also that there was a variable element left, in some cases, to be the subject of bargaining between the two kins of the injurer and the injured. Some broad lines of demarcation, however, may be clearly traced. We know that the ceorl was called a _twy-hynd_ man, because the ordinary compensation for his violent death was 200 shillings. A Welshman, however, who owned that single hide of land which seems to have been the normal property of the well-to-do ceorl, was entitled to a _wergild_ of only 120 shillings, but if he so prospered as to become the owner of five hides of English soil then his wergild rose to the proportionate amount of _600_ shillings. The class next above the ceorl, the class corresponding with the gentry of modern times, the large land-holders who do not happen to hold any official position at the king’s court, were in the ninth century spoken of as _thegns_; and that word may, for convenience, be used here, though it is perhaps doubtful whether it was yet used as the simple designation of a class. In the word thegn the thought of soldiership and of service to the king seem almost inseparably blended. In the poem of Beowulf thegns seems to be equivalent to warriors.; while in the charters of Anglo-Saxon kings the Latin equivalent of thegn is almost invariably _minister_. In the laws of Ine these men seem to be generally spoken of as _gesithcund_, men who by birth were entitled to be comrades and attendants of the king; and it is almost certain that they are identical with the _twelf-hyndemen_, their wergild being fixed at 1,200 shillings. Higher than this these laws do not enable us to go, but the tenor of later legislation supports the conjecture that the _wergild_ for an ealdorman or for a bishop was 4,800 shillings, for an archbishop or etheling (member of the royal house), 9,000 shillings, and for the king himself, 18,000 shillings.[105]