Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/573

Rh NOBILITY 529 any being, apart from the body of which he is a member. He has a vote in making the laws or in choosing those who make them ; but when they are made he is, if any thing, more strictly bound by them than the citizen of the non-privileged order. To be a fraction of the corporate sovereign, if it had its gains, had also its disadvantages ; the Venetian noble was fettered by burthens, restrictions, and suspicions from which the Venetian citizen was free. The noble of the large country, on the other hand, the rural noble, as he commonly will be, is a member of an order, but he is hardly a member of a corporation ; he is isolated ; he acts apart from the rest of the body and wins powers for himself apart from the rest of the body. He shows a tendency a tendency whose growth will be more or less checked according to the strength of the central power to grow into something of a lord or even a prince on his own account, a growth which may advance to the scale of a German elector or stop at that of an English lord of a manor. Now many of these tendencies were carried into those Italian cities where the civic nobility was a half-tamed country nobility ; but they have no place in the true civic aristocracies. Let us take one typical example. In many parts of western Europe the right of private war long remained the privilege of every noble, as it had once been the privilege of every freeman. And in some Italian cities, the right, or at least the privilege, of private war was continued within the city walls. But no power of imagination can conceive an acknowledged right of private war in Rome, Venice, or Bern. The other point of difference is that, whatever we take for the origin and the definition of nobility, in most countries it became something that could be given from outside, without the need of any consent on the part of the noble class itself. In other words, the king or other prince can ennoble. We have seen how much this takes away from the true notion of nobility as understood in the aristocratic commonwealths. The nobility is no longer all-powerful; it may be con strained to admit within its own body members for whose presence it has no wish. Where this power exists the nobility is no longer in any strictness an aristocracy; it may have great privileges, great influence, even great legal powers, but it is not the real ruling body, like the true aristocracy of Venice. Nobili- In the modern states of western Europe the existing ties in nobility seems to have for the most part had its origin ^ rl y in personal service to the prince. And this nobility by Europe P ersona l service seems commonly to have supplanted an older nobility, the origin of which was, in some cases at least, strictly immemorial. Of this process in England, the substitution of the later nobility of the thegns for the older nobility of the eorls, something has already been said in the article ENGLAND- (vol. viii. pp. 274-5). Now the analogy between this change and the change from the Roman patriciate to the later Roman nobilitas is obvious. In both cases the older nobility gives way to a newer ; and in both cases the newer nobility was a nobility of office. Under a kingly government office bestowed by the sove reign holds the same place which office bestowed by the people holds in a popular government. This new nobility of office supplanted, or perhaps rather absorbed, the older nobility, just as the later nobilitas of Rome supplanted or absorbed the old patriciate. In our first glimpse of Teutonic institutions, as given us by Tacitus, this older nobility appears as strictly immemorial (see Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, i. 185 sq.), and its immemorial character appears also in the well-known legend in the Rigsmal-saga of the separate creation of jarl, karl, and thrall. These represent the three classes of mankind according to old Teutonic ideas the noble, the simple free man, and the bondman. The kingly house, where there is one, is not a distinct class ; it is simply the noblest of the noble. For, as almost everywhere else, this Teutonic nobility admits of degrees, though it is yet harder to say in what the degrees of nobility consisted than to say in what nobility consisted itself. The older nobility is independent of the possession of land ; it is independent of office about the sovereign ; it is hard to say what were the powers and privileges attached to it ; but of its existence there is no doubt. But in no part of Europe can the existing nobility trace itself to this immemorial nobility of primitive days ; the nobility of mediaeval and modern days springs from the later nobility of office. The nobles of modern Europe are rather thegnas than eorlas. The eorl of the old system would doubtless commonly become a thegn under the new, as the Roman patrician took his place in the new nolilitas ; but others could take their place there also. The Old-English laws point out ways by which the churl might rise to thegn s rank, and in the centuries during which the change went on we find mention complaining mention both in England and elsewhere, at the court of Charles the Simple and at the court of ^Ethelred, of the rise of new men to posts of authority. The story that Earl Godwine himself was of churlish birth, whether true or false, marks the possibility of such a rise. A still wilder tale spoke of Hugh Capet as the son of a butcher of Paris. Stories like these prove even more than the real rise of Hagano and Eadric. In England the nobility of the thegns was to a great England, extent personally displaced, so to speak, by the results of the Norman Conquest. But the idea of nobility did not greatly change. The English thegn sometimes yielded to, sometimes changed into, the Norman baron, using that word in its widest sense, without any violent alteration in his position. The notion of holding land of the king became more prominent than the notion of personal ser vice done to the king ; but, as the land was held by the tenure of personal service, the actual relation hardly changed. But the connexion between nobility and the holding of land comes out in the practice by which the lord so constantly took the name of his lordship. It is in this way that the prefixes de and von, descriptions in themselves essentially local, have become in other lands badges of nobility. This notion has died out in England by the dropping of the preposition ; but it long lived on wherever Latin or French was used. And before long nobility won for itself a distinguishing outward badge. The device of hereditary coat-armour, a growth of the 1 2th century, did much to define and mark out the noble class throughout Europe. As it could be acquired by grant of the sovereign, and as, when once acquired, it went on from generation to generation, it answers exactly to the jus imagimim at Rome, the hereditary badge of nobility con ferred by the election of the people. Those who possessed the right of coat-armour by immemorial use, or by grant in regular form, formed the class of nobility or gentry, words which, it must again be remembered, are strictly of the same meaning. They held whatever privileges or advantages have attached in different times and places to the rank of nobility or gentry. In England indeed a variety of causes hindered nobility or gentry from ever obtaining the importance which they obtained, for instance, in France. But perhaps no cause was more important than the growth of the peerage (see PEERAGE). That institution at once set up a new standard of nobility, a new form of the nobility of office. The peer in strictness, the peer in his own person only, not even his children became the only noble ; the ideas of nobility and gentry thus became divorced in a way in which they are not in any other coun try. Those who would elsewhere have been counted as the nobility, the bearers of coat-armour by good right, were XVII. 67