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 THE ANCESTOR 97 to the council or to the tribesmen that the Britons appealed in their distress, but to the aethelings or ealdormen. Even in the time of Caesar the land was allotted to every man by the alder- men and magistrates, not by the council, and it is probable that the conquered territories in England were parted by the ealdor- men amongst their personal followers, and that our ' hams * and ' tons ' take their names not from free tribal communities but from the eorls to whom they were assigned. But to take up again the main thread of my argument, which is the medieval conception of nobility^ and especially ot gentility as allied to freedom, I would point out that the same idea is conveyed by the classical gens and gentilis, Horace has sine gente for one that bears a servile name and is descended from servile ancestors. In the earliest days of Rome, when every free-born man was a patrician, the gens was a military and political union of families and so of patreSy descended from a common ancestor and bearing the same name. The gentiles^ or members of these clans, were alone eligible for public office. We hear of gentile statutes and decrees and even of war waged by a gens, and it would therefore appear that each of these clans or kindreds must have originally possessed a common council or assembly, with the power of exacting military service from all its members. Every pater^ or head of a family, had patria potestas^ that is to say absolute power extending even to punishment by death, over all his descendants in the male line born in just^e nuptia. Under the same private law of patria potestaSy the landed property of the clan {hereditates gentilici^) was divided amongst the patres^ and it is in this connection that we find what is probably the first occurrence of the word gentilis. The Twelve Tables, published in b.c. 449, enact that si agnatus nec escit^ gentiles familiam habento. The circle of the gens was drawn closer by the sacra gentilicia^ or common wor- ship and sacrifice peculiar to its members, such as the cult of Apollo by the Julian. The tumulus gentilicius was at first com- mon to all the gentilesy as in the case of the Claudii, and the ^ It appears by a passage in Theganus that nobility was impossible after enfranchisement. Neckam {Chronicles and Memorials, pp. 243-4) speaks of nobility adorning liberty. Upton lays down that a man may be noble in one place and ignoble in another, as is apparent in the case of the English nobles captured in the realm of France, because as long as they are in the hands of their enemies they are serfs and captives of the latter, and yet in England they remain free and noble as before (Bysshe, Upton, p. 3).