It would obviously not be wise to trust solely to the negative evidence of the silence of the laws, but in this case the silence seems to confirm the evidence of the fragment. For the pathetic tone of the fragment finds an echo in the fact that all traces of the middle rungs in the ladder seem to have vanished from the later laws. There is no mention in Ine’s laws or in Alfred’s of there being or having been several grades of freedmen or læts. Even the half wergeld of the six-hynde stranger who has risen to the possession of five hides silently disappears after King Alfred’s time. From whatever cause, so far as the evidence goes, the twy-hynde class seems to have become a homogeneous class in which, in spite of different origins, distinctions were merged in a common economic condition. Differences of origin were perhaps forgotten as the result of comradeship in the long struggle against the Danish foe. [Sidenote: And this kept open the gulf between twy-hynde and twelve-hynde classes.] We thus seem to be driven to recognise the width and to some extent the bridgelessness, already in King Alfred’s time if not in King Ine’s, of the gulf between the position of the twelve-hynde landed class and that of the twy-hynde dependent class of gafolgeldas and geburs who were tenants on their land. It seems probable that, though technically and really free in the sense of not being thralls, the twy-hynde class, broadly speaking, may have found themselves very early, if not from the first, placed in an economic condition of service and servitude, including work as well as gafol, which by the ultimate disappearance of the middle rungs of the ladder might very easily slide into what is loosely called the ‘serfdom’ of later times. In the meantime we realise that the abjectness of this semi-servile condition may be very easily exaggerated by modern associations with the terms ‘service’ and ‘serfdom.’ It is when we turn from the twy-hynde class to the position of the class above them, of gesithcund and twelve-hynde men, that we learn that a part at least of the risk of misunderstanding may lie in the difference between the tribal notion of service and freedom and the more modern one. [Sidenote: Position and services of the twelve-hynde class.] What, then, has tribal custom to teach us as to the position and services of the twelve-hynde class? [Sidenote: On a level with the Norse odalman.]