derstand what that means. One would
infer that the weregild was only paid by a man with relatives on his
father's side. It doesn't say that, but that is the inference. We
shall have plenty to say about the guilds later--the historical
predecessors of the modern trades-unions. We here find the word
_guild_ recognized and spoken of in the law as early as 890.

A.D. 920. WESSEX. EDWARD.

"2. And if a ceorl throve, so that had fully five hides of his
own land, church and kitchen, bell-house and burh-gate-seat,
and special duty in the king's hall, then was he thenceforth of
thegn-right worthy.

"6. And if a merchant throve, so that he fared thrice over the
wide sea by his own means, then was he thenceforth of thegn-right
worthy."

Worldly success has thus always been the foundation of English
nobility.

Then there is a good deal about how much you have to pay for a churl,
and how much for an earl, and so on, leaving out only the slaves; for
all the free people of England in Saxon times were divided into earls
and churls; that is, noblemen and agricultural laborers or yeomanry;
these were the two estates besides the church, always a class by
itself. Later there grew up the thanes, who were merely large
landlords; the law became that a man that had five hides of land, five
or six hundred acres, with a farm, should by the mere fact of having
that land become a thane, an earl. That method of ennobling a man by
land got to be a way, at that time the only way, by which a churl or a
villein could become a nobleman or even be emancipated. Exactly as now
with our American Indians; when an Indian gets one hundred and sixty
acres given to him in severalty he becomes, under the Dawes Act, a
citizen of the United States. Later there grew up emancipation by the
guilds. The word _guild_ meant the members of a certain handicraft,
but that was rather the secondary meaning; it originally meant the
freemen of the town. But the freemen of the towns were made up of
the freemen of the guilds. No one could become a member of the guild
without going through certain ceremonies, much as he would now to join
a trades-union; and no one could become a freeman of the town unless
he was a freeman of the guild. The law grew to be, however, that if a
man succeeded in staying in a town for a year and a day, without being
turned out, plying his handicraft, he became by that mere fact a
freeman of the town; for the citize