Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 41
will be readily seen how favourable was the state of so-
ciety produced by commendation to the growth of courts
presided over by great landholders. These courts were
called hattmoots, probably to contrast them with the
open-air courts of hundred and shire. They must be
regarded as private courts, but the people of the time did
not so think of them. Private courts were new, and they
must wait some time before contrasting ideas of public
and private jurisdiction could arise. It was an institu-
tionally unconscious age. Moreover, men were then
mainly interested in the financial side of jurisdiction.
They were not asking whose courts these were, but who
were to get the fines levied in them. They did not think
that the king had given any one a court, which was thus
changed from a public to a private court, but that he had
given some one the right to receive fines in a certain
district. On the eve of the Conquest, then, landlords
could not ipso facto hold courts for freemen. Where such
courts were held by them—and there were many instances
in Edward the Confessor's reign—they did it as a special
privilege or franchise from the crown, and it was looked
on as a variant way of carrying on ordinary public juris-
diction in part of a hundred.
It has been said that the grants of bookland were at
first made only to churches. Had they remained thus
limited, they could not have caused changes of great
importance. But their extension was inevitable, for there
were nearly as many motives for making such grants to
lay nobles as to bishops or abbots. The rapidly growing
class of thegns was the class concerned. Whatever their
origin,1 the thegns in the later Anglo-Saxon period were
forming a nobility of wealth and birth about the rank in
society of the later country gentlemen: a man "throve to
thegnright" when he acquired a certain amount of land,
and the rank was heritable. An aristocracy was growing
through economic differentiation of the freemen. There is
much about the thegn that reminds one of the feudal
1 See above, pp. 13, 14.