These are marks of direct relationship and service of the gesithcund classes to the king, to which we shall have to recur. They seem to point to the gesithcund class with its completeness of kindred as a privileged class in a semi-official position and from which the king’s officials were chosen. It is not until this relationship by service to the king has become established that a ceorl finds an entrance into the gesithcund class, and he does not become eligible for such service till he is surrounded by an adequate kindred. In the meantime we may be thankful to the exigences of the Viking invasions for the preservation of these valuable fragments of ancient custom which might otherwise have been lost. [Illustration] CHAPTER XIII. _EARLY ANGLO-SAXON CUSTOM._ I. KING ALFRED’S DOOMS. [Sidenote: Alfred’s laws not earlier than the Compact with Guthrum.] In order that the examination of early Anglo-Saxon custom may be free from the intrusion of elements introduced by the Northmen, it is necessary to go back to evidence of earlier date than the laws of King Alfred. Though collected mainly from earlier sources, these laws took their present form probably after the Compact with Guthrum had been made. They do not profess to be a full statement of early West-Saxon law. King Alfred himself declares that he dared not add much of his own, ‘But those things which I met with either of the days of Ine my kinsman, or of Offa, King of the Mercians, or of Ethelbert--those which seemed to me the rightest I have here gathered together and rejected the others.’ Under these circumstances it will be more convenient to refer back to King Alfred’s laws when needful in connection with the earlier evidence than to consider them as a separate whole. There is, however, one subject upon which the evidence of King Alfred’s laws may properly be considered before passing on to the earlier laws. [Sidenote: Were the terms ceorl and gafol-gelda equivalent?] We have seen that in the Compact with Guthrum the Anglo-Saxon ‘ceorl who sits on gafol-land’ and who was made ‘equally dear’ at 200 scillings with the Danish lysing was, if the words may be taken strictly, not necessarily a typical or representative member of the ceorlisc class as a whole. Only some of the ceorlisc class may have been gafol-geldas on other people’s land. It is important, therefore, to examine whether King Alfred’s laws afford contemporary evidence that the ceorlisc and the twy-hynde classes were practically the same, and whether they were, as a rule, gafol-geldas. We have seen, from the precious fragments before quoted, that under ancient ‘English’ law a ceorl could rise out of the twy-hynde class and become entitled to a twelve-hynde wergeld of 2000 thrymsas.