Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/113

 who kept a suite of eighty or ninety men; as Erling, Harek of Thiotö, and others. Swein, of the little isle of Gairsay in Orkney, kept, we are told in the Orkneyinga Saga, eighty men all winter; and as we see the owner of this farm, which could not produce bread for one fourth of that number, trusting for many years to his success in piracy for subsisting his retainers, we must conclude that they formed a numerous class of the community. This class would also include workpeople, labourers, fishermen, tradesmen, and others about towns and farms, or rural townships, who, although personally free and freeborn, not slaves, were unfree in respect of the rights possessed by the class of bonders, landowners, or peasants, in the Things. They had the protection and civil rights imparted by laws, but not the right to a voice in the enactment of the laws, or regulation of public affairs in the Things of the country. They were, in their rights, in the condition of the German population at the present day.

The class above the unfree in civil rights, the free peasant-proprietors, or bonder class, were the most important and influential in the community. We have no word in English, or in any other modern language, exactly equivalent to the word bondi, because the class itself never existed among us. Peasant does not express it; because we associate with the word peasant the idea of inferior social importance to the feudal nobility, gentry, and landed proprietors of a country, and this bonder class was itself the highest class in the country. Yeoman, or, in Cumberland, statesman, expresses their condition only relatively to the portions of land owned by them; not their social position as the highest class of landowners. If the Americans had a word to express the class of small landholders in their old settled states who live on their little properties, have the highest social in-