customs and manners of our Saxon forefathers without employing words
so mixed up with their daily usages and modes of thinking as
"weregeld" and "niddering"? Would any words from the modern
vocabulary suggest the same idea, or embody the same meaning?

One critic good-humouredly exclaims, "We have a full attendance of
thegns and cnehts, but we should have liked much better our old
friends and approved good masters thanes and knights." Nothing could
be more apposite for my justification than the instances here quoted
in censure; nothing could more plainly vindicate the necessity of
employing the Saxon words. For I should sadly indeed have misled the
reader if I had used the word knight in an age when knights were
wholly unknown to the Anglo-Saxon and cneht no more means what we
understand by knight, than a templar in modern phrase means a man in
chain mail vowed to celibacy, and the redemption of the Holy Sepulchre
from the hands of the Mussulman. While, since thegn and thane are
both archaisms, I prefer the former; not only for the same reason that
induces Sir Francis Palgrave to prefer it, viz., because it is the
more etymologically correct; but because we take from our neighbours
the Scotch, not only the word thane, but the sense in which we apply
it; and that sense is not the same that we ought to attach to the
various and complicated notions of nobility which the Anglo-Saxon
comprehended in the title of thegn. It has been peremptorily said by
more than one writer in periodicals, that I have overrated the
erudition of William, in permitting him to know Latin; nay, to have
read the Comments of Caesar at the age of eight.--Where these
gentlemen find the authorities to confute my statement I know not; all
I know is, that in the statement I have followed the original
authorities usually deemed the best. And I content myself with
referring the disputants to a work not so difficult to procure as (and