This again we learn from the law attributed to Eádweard the Confessor. “Cum autem maiores causae insurgebant (that is greater than those which concerned the tithing), referebant eas ad alios maiores iusticiarios, quos sapientes supradicti super eos constituerant, scilicet super decem decanos, quos possumus vocare centenarios, quia super centum friðborgos iudicabant.” § xxix. Footnote 469: I find no instance of a hundredes man having the _blut-bann_ or _ius gladii_: but in the time of Eádgár, he seems to have had power to administer the single and threefold ordeal; whether only in the case of serfs does not appear. Inst. Hundr. Thorpe, i. 260. Footnote 470: “Licet apud concilium accusare quoque et discrimen capitis intendere.” Germ. xii. ----- At a comparatively late period, we occasionally find a consolidation of hundreds into one body, for judicial purposes, presided over by the ealdorman of the shire, or his geréfa, and forming a subsidiary court to the shiremoot: and after immunities, or private jurisdictions, had become rapidly extended, it is certain that such consolidations were not unusual, in the hands of great civil or ecclesiastical authorities, and that they, by means of their officers or geréfan, held plea in several hundreds at once; they thus substituted their own power for that of the ealdorman or the sheriff, in the last instance, throughout the district comprehended by their immunity; either replacing the old hundred-men by geréfan or bailiffs, or suffering the hundreds to be still governed and administered in the way common to all such divisions, by the elective officer[471]. It stands to reason that the system above described applied only to the really free. It was the form of the original compact between the independent members of an independent community. But as by the side of the free landholders, there dwelt also unfree men of various ranks, so also there existed modifications of the original compact, suited to their condition. Those who in a more or less stringent degree were dependent, could not be members of the tithing, the hundred or the folcmót. They stood to right among themselves, in their lord’s court, not in the people’s, and in the latter they could not appear for themselves. The institution therefore which provided that the lord might maintain a Comitatus or _following_, provided also that its members should all be in his mund (protection) and borh (surety), and that he should make answer for them in the courts from which they were themselves excluded[472]. ----- Footnote 471: Eádweard the Confessor granted the hundred of Hornmere in Berkshire to Ordríc, abbat of Abingdon; “so that no sheriff or mootreeve may hold therein any plea or moot, without the Abbat’s own command and permission.” Cod. Dip. No. 840. He also granted the hundred of Godley in Surrey to Wulfwold, Abbat of Chertsey, and forbade the sheriff to meddle in the same. Cod. Dip. No. 840, 849.