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'The Thane of Cawdor lives, a prosperous Gentleman', wrote Shakespeare with confident grace, but we have no more notion than he did, as to how the thanes began to thrive.
The first recorded Thane of Cawdor, Donald, comes into the candle-light of history as one of the witnesses to a humdrum legal document in 1295.
The dynastic dignity of thane was the equivalent, in Scotland, of a feudal baron holding lands from the Crown. A thane was frequently the chieftain of a clan, always the administrator of his district, usually an influential individual with power of life and death, and was only answerable to the King or to his deputy or to God.
The word 'thane' was borrowed from the Saxons who had adapted it from the Norse title thegn - meaning a trusted servant of the King -just as 'earl' was taken from the Norse title of jarl; these were the oldest distinctions of nobility in the Middle Ages.
King Edward I of England (d. 1307) had defined penalties for injuring the various grades of society; The Cro (fine) for killing the King's son or an earl was 150 cows, and for an earl's son or a thane 100; an ingenious tax: index-linked, quality-controlled, mobile and edible.
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In Scotland, a total of sixty-three thanedoms once existed, from Haddington south of Edinburgh; from Fortingall west of Perth, across the vale of Strathmore to Fettercairn; up to Aberdeen and over to Dingwall and down to Rothiemurchus. Wherever there was rich red soil, fertile enough to feed warriors, there were sure to be thanes waiting, patiently, for trouble.
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