CHAPTER II.
TYCHO BRAHE'S YOUTH.
Tycho Brahe belonged to an ancient noble family which had for centuries flourished not only in Denmark, but also in Sweden, to which country it had spread in the fourteenth century, when one of its members, Torkil Brahe, fled thither from Denmark to escape punishment for manslaughter. The family still exists in both countries. In the sixteenth century the Danish nobility was still of purely national origin, unmingled with the foreign blood which became merged in it in the course of the next two hundred years, when every new royal bride brought with her a train of needy adventurers, with empty purses and long titles, from the Holy Roman Empire. Like their foreign fellow-nobles, they were descended from men who had received grants of land on tenure of military service, and until about the end of the thirteenth century they can hardly be said to have formed a separate class, as their privileges and duties were not yet of necessity hereditary. They were untitled (till 1671), but all the same they were as proud and jealous of the privileges of their order as any Norman count or baron, and were called by the characteristic names of "free and wellborn" or "good men." In the first half of the sixteenth century they had successfully resisted the attempts of King Christiern II. to curb their power, and had driven him from his throne; and when the lower orders afterwards had attempted to replace him on the throne rendered vacant
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