noun
definition
A rank of nobility in pre-Norman England, roughly equivalent to baron.
Examples of thane in a Sentence
This Harding the thane was son of Elnod or Alnod,.
The name, of which the Tene, Tayne and Thane are older forms. is derived from the Icelandic thing, " assembly" or "court."
The word thane was used in Scotland until the 15th century, to describe an hereditary non-military tenant of the crown.
The castle was the scene, according to the tradition which Shakespeare has perpetuated, of the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth, thane of Cawdor (or Calder), in 1040.
One is of the yeoman 's son of a Saxon village Thane, as was Michael 's Robin.
Moreover, he wrote an article in the Edinburgh Review of July 1805 criticizing Sir William Gill's Topography of Troy, and these circumstances led Lord Byron to refer to him in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as "the travell'd thane, Athenian Aberdeen."
The change was probably owing to the fact that Ilbert de Lacy, to whom the Conqueror had granted the whole of the honour of Pontefract, founded a castle at Kirkby, on a site said to have been occupied by a fortification raised by Ailric, a Saxon thane.
Macduff's cave near Kincraig Point is believed traditionally to have been that in which the thane took refuge from Macbeth.
It does not mean, of course, that their condition was practically the same, but in any case the fact testifies to the gulf which had come to separate the two principal subdivisions of the free class - the ceorl and the thane.
In the British Museum are the bronze matrices of seals of ZEthilwald, bishop of Dunwich, about Boo; of lElfric, alderman of Hampshire, about 985; and the finely carved ivory double matrix of Godwin the thane (on the obverse) and of the nun Godcythe (on the reverse), of the beginning of the 11th century.
Old pedigree-makers from the 14th century onward have made of Harding a younger son of a king of Denmark and a companion of the Conqueror, while modern historians assert his identity with one Harding who, although an English thane, is recorded by Domesday Book in 1086 as a great landowner in Somerset.
The reverence and authority which was accorded the famous compilation of the Alexandrian astronomer is well evidenced by the catalogue of the Tatar Ulugh Beg, the Arabian names thane adopted being equivalent to the Ptolemaic names in nearly every case; this is also shown in the Latin translations given below.
It is said to have been named Athfotla (Atholl) after Fotla, son of the Pictish king Cruithne, and was under the rule of a Celtic mormaer (thane or earl) until the union of the Picts and Scots under Kenneth Macalpine in 843.
Berhtwald the thane, in 788, and lEthelwulf of Mercia, in 857, affixed their seals to certain documents.