Footnote 472: “And let every lord have his household in his own _borh_. Then if any of them should be accused, and escape, let the lord pay the man’s _wer_ to the king. And if any accuse the lord that the escape was by his counsel, let him clear himself with five thanes, being himself the sixth. If the purgation fail him, let him forfeit his _wer_ to the king; and let the man be an outlaw.“ Æðelr. i. § 1. Thorpe, i. 282. “And let every lord have his household in his own _borh_, and if any one accuse his man of any thing, let the lord answer for him within the hundred, wherein he is cited, as just law is. And if he escape,” etc. Cnut, ii. § 31. Thorpe, i. 394, 396. “Archiepiscopi, episcopi, comites, barones et milites suos, et proprios servientes suos, scilicet dapiferos, pincernas, camerarios, cocos, pistores, sub suo friðborgo habebant, et ipsi suos armigeros et alios servientes suos sub suo friðborgo; quod si ipsi forisfacerent, et clamor vicinorum insurgeret de eis, ipsi haberent eos ad rectum in curia sua, si haberent sacham et socam, tol et theam, et infangenethef.” Edw. Conf. xxi. Thorpe, i. 451. ----- It is difficult to decide whether the lords or nobles were at first comprised within the popular corporations: it appears most probable that they were not; that they were sufficient to their own defence, and, even from the earliest historical periods, in possession of that _immunity_ which released their lands from the jurisdiction of the popular tribunals. In respect therefore to the gylds, they may be supposed to have held an independent, though not necessarily hostile, position, regulated indeed by the public law: and if they stood to right with their men, in the folcmót, it was the collective power and dignity of the state with which they had to deal, and not the smaller associations, founded upon necessities of which they were not conscious. Their dependents were under their guarantee and surety, as the members of every man’s household, his wife, children and serfs, were under _his_: for them he was responsible to the community at large, but he owed no suit or service to others, and if he persisted in upholding wrong, I fear the only corrective was to be found in the inalienable _ius belli_, which resumes its power instantly upon the violation of that tacit understanding among men, that the well-being of society depends upon a regulated mutual forbearance. Those were not ages in which acts of self-defence or righteous retribution could be misnamed revolutions. But all these remarks are intended to apply only to a state of society in which the nobles were few and independent, the people strong and united; where the people were in truth the aristocracy[473], and the nobles only their chiefs. The holder of an immunity (having sacn and sócn) in later times, under a consolidated royalty representing the national will, and in a state from which the element of the people had nearly vanished,