Note 102 — Chapter III · THE CONSTITUTION OF ENGLAND IN THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES.[82]

This comparison may surprise some who have been accustomed to look on the ceorlas as a very degraded class. There can be no doubt that among the ceorlas there were men of very different positions, that the general tendency of their position was to sink, and that, by the time of the Norman Conquest, some classes of them had advanced a good way on the road to serfdom. But this was not the condition of the whole order even then; still less was it the original conception of ceorldom. The original ceorl is a citizen and a soldier; he is, or may be, a landowner; on the one hand he is free, on the other he is not noble. See the remarks in Hallam’s Supplementary Notes already referred to.