THE ANCESTOR Professor Skeat in his glossarial index to the poem renders ' gentel-men * as ^ free-men,' but this interpretation hardly goes far enough. Gentility here, as in the definitions of Scaevola and Cicero and Boetius, is ancient freedom of race. A gentleman then is not, as the New English Dictionary lays down, a person of ' heraldic status ' who is ' entitled to bear arms,' but a freeman whose ancestors have always been free. In blood he represents the unconquered tribesman of Germany or Britain, and in name the ancient liberty of Rome. To my mind this is not only a true but also a comfortable doctrine, for even the most earnest Radical will hardly repress some feeling of respect for the families which clung to freedom, or fought for it, when most of the world was enslaved, nor ever ' bowed their heads for meat in the evil days.' It is a doctrine which will of course involve us in some difficulties. In the fourteenth century villein tenure had not yet developed into copyhold, and no one whose forefathers at that period held
- in bondage ' can possibly come under the terms of our defi-
nition. We are thus driven to the painful but irresistible conclusion that quite twenty-five per cent of our peers are not gentlemen. On the other hand, many persons whom we have not been accustomed to regard in that light may have a good claim to the title ; it may be urged that for four centuries, a period as long as most patrician stemmata could show, our English ancestors have been a free nation ; and perhaps, after all, we shall do better to drop the use of ' gentleman ' as a description of rank or status, and to conclude with Chaucer's elf-queen that it is not 'renomee of auncestres,' but 'gentil dedes ' which make the ' gentil man.* GEORGE R. SITWELL.
