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Housecarl is a calque of the original Old Norse term, húskarl, which literally means "house man". Karl is cognate to the Old English churl, or ceorl, meaning a man, or a non-servile peasant. [2] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle uses hiredmenn as a term for all paid warriors and thus is applied to housecarl, but it also refers to butsecarls [a] and ...
The term comes from Old Norse hirð, (meaning Herd) again from either Old English hir(e)d 'household, family, retinue, court' [3] or perhaps the old German cognate heirat 'marriage', both of which can mean "body of men" or more directly linked to the term for hearthguard, or men of one's own home and hearth.
A churl (Old High German karal), in its earliest Old English (Anglo-Saxon) meaning, was simply "a man" or more particularly a "free man", [1] but the word soon came to mean "a non-servile peasant", still spelled ċeorl(e), and denoting the lowest rank of freemen.
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The third, Codex Holmanius 7, written in the fourteenth century, is shorter than the other versions and gives a brief summary of the saga. The fourth, Flateyjarbók, is a combination of the Jómsvíking saga and the Greater saga of Óláfr Tryggvason. Lastly, the fifth version, was a Latin translation of Arngrímr Jónsson written in the year 1592.
The Old English term that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle uses for the Danish Army is "here"; Ine of Wessex in his law code, issued in about 694, provides a definition of "here" as "an invading army or raiding party containing more than thirty-five men", yet the terms "here" and "fyrd" are used interchangeably in later sources in respect of the ...
It gradually expanded in meaning and use, to denote a member of a territorial nobility, while thegnhood was attainable by fulfilling certain conditions. [ 4 ] An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary describes a thane as "one engaged in a king's or a queen's service, whether in the household or in the country".
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