Note 290 — Chapter III · THE KING’S COURT AND HOUSEHOLD.

This observation requires to be taken with some caution. The Witherlags Ret was a private and bye-law, not a public law, and had little to do with the public law, except in as far as it connected the conquering force by closer bonds, and secured their energetic action as a body, upon emergency. It was devised to keep the household troops together, not to apply in any way to their public relation towards the Saxons. Its influence was therefore only such as derived mediately from the fact of its maintaining the king at the head of a select prætorian cohort,—important occasionally, but always accidental. There is no evidence that the great men of England, the Godwines, or Leófrics, were ever Húscarlas, or that the leaders of this force were ever Ealdormen or Geréfan. In fact it was the king’s “Army-club,” and had neither constitutional place nor recognized power. The Húscarlas were probably very like what the Mousquetaires and Gardes-de-corps were in France before the first Revolution, and what the Lifeguards, Leib-regimente, Guardia Real, and so on, have been in other states of Europe; nor altogether unlike the Garde Impériale of Napoleon.