gesithcund
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Learned borrowing from Old English gesiþcund.
Adjective[edit]
gesithcund (not comparable)
- Having the rank of a gesith (member of the king's retinue) in medieval England; well-born.
- 1874, William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development, volume I, Oxford: at the Clarendon Press:
- The eorlcundman is worth his high wergild even if he be landless: the ceorl may attain to thegn-right and yet his children to the third generation will not be gesithcund.
- 1902, Frederic Seebohm, Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law:
- The same class which, regarded from the point of view of the wergeld, possessed completeness of kindred and the twelve-hynde oath, when looked at from another point of view was gesithcund, i.e. more or less directly in the service of the King and belonging to the official and landed class.
- 1973, D. J. V. Fisher, The Anglo-Saxon Age, c. 400–1042, Longman, →ISBN, page 131:
- Among the gesithcund class were men who, by virtue of the value the king put on their services, as military subordinates, as his representations in recently subjected territories, or as officers within his kingdom, acquired additional distinction. It became normal for men of gesithcund status to attach themselves not only to kings but to the greatest of their servants.