[Sidenote: Land grants of 10 hides.] Again, if we turn to the grants made by King Ine to the monasteries, they become intelligible if the system of management of the Royal domains in units and multiples of ten hides may be understood to underlie them. When Ine grants to Aldhelm, then Abbot of Malmesbury, ‘45 cassati’ in the county of Wilts, the grant is found to consist of groups of ‘manentes’ in four different places. And the groups consist of 5, 20, 10, and 10.[262] When Ine makes a grant to Abbot Bernald of land in Somersetshire it consists of three groups of 20, 20, and 20 _cassati_ or _manentes_ from three different estates.[263] And when he makes a similar grant to Glastonbury it consists of 10, 10, 20, 20 hides and one hide in five different places in Somersetshire.[264] So also when Bede mentions the donations by King Oswy to the Abbess Hilda of 12 _possessiuncula terrarum_ he adds that six were in the province of Deira and six in Bernicia and that each of them consisted of 10 _familiæ_, so that in all there were 120.[265] Now it would seem that as ealdormen were set over shires so gesithcund men may have been set over smaller units of 10 hides or multiples of 10 hides, holding them as lænland, not only for services rendered, but also with some kind of subordinate official or even judicial functions. [Sidenote: Official position of the gesithcundman.] Schmid long ago pointed out that the translator of Bede in six passages translated the Latin _comes_ by ‘gesith’ or ‘gesithcundman.’[266] This seems to imply that his position was in some sense an official one, subordinate indeed to the ealdorman’s, as we may also learn from the translator of Bede. For while he translates the ‘_villa comitis_’ of Bede as the ‘_gesith’s hus_’ he translates the ‘_villa regis_’ as the residence of the king’s ealdor (‘botl cyninges ealdor’).[267] We found in s. 45 of King Ine’s Laws above quoted that the gesithcundman’s burg-bryce was thirty-five scillings while the ealdorman’s was eighty scillings. Still, though the lowest official in the scale, it was something that he should be named with the King, the ealdorman, and the King’s thane as having a burg-bryce according to which he was to make legal denial (ansacan). The omission from this clause as to burg-bryce of classes below him seems to mark that while even the ceorlisc man--_i.e._ even the gafol-gelda or gebur--was responsible for the peace within his ‘flet’ and received a fight-wite when it was broken by fighting in it, the gesithcundman belonged to the class with some sort of extra jurisdiction beyond that which attached to every man whose homestead was by long tribal custom a sacred precinct. [Sidenote: His judicial and magisterial duties.]