[285]. Cod. Dipl. No. 436.
[286]. Ibid. No. 436.
[287]. Ibid. No. 813.
[288]. Ibid. No. 813.
[289]. Thorpe’s Lappenberg, ii. 202, and his references to Suen Aggonis, Hist. Legum Castrens. Regis Canuti Magni, c. iv. ap. Langebek, iii. 146; ii. 454, note d. Palgrave, ii. p. ccclxxxi. Ellis, Introd. Domesd. i. 91; ii. 151 seq.
[290]. 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.
[291]. Three thousand men, all disciplined, all well-armed, all united by the certainty that the struggle must be for life or death, formed a force morally, if not physically and numerically, superior to any that could be brought against them on a sudden. Such a body were amply secure in a state which could only set on foot a clumsy and reluctant militia. They were, in fact, nearly the only professional soldiers,—and as yet there had been no Rocroy, Sempach or Morgarten.
[292]. Adam Bremen. ii. 48, 59; iii. 21.
[293]. Suen Aggon. i. cap. 10.
[294]. Sax. Chron. 1049. Will. Malm. lib. iv. de Willelmo Secundo, an. 1088 (Hardy’s ed. ii. 489). But Lappenberg’s conclusion is not justified by the premises, for Niðing, which Mat. Paris declares to have been so especially an Anglosaxon word as to be untranslatable, was probably in use as a term of supreme contempt, long before the establishment of the Húscarlas in England and long after their disbanding.