Isn't it time we got rid of these spongers and gave the land back to the people they stole it from?

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No more tenant farmers whose blood, sweat and tears goes into the coffers of the landed gentry.

Was pre-Norman English society all that egalitarian? Harold wasn't the unpaid chairman of a local community association - he was king and had all the privileges that came with it. The Sutton Hoo ship burial wasn't for one of your every-day Anglo-Saxons. It was for a man of great wealth and power.

The various kingdoms that came to make up England each had their kings, aeldermen, thanes, ceorls and slaves. The wittan, as a council of advisors, could choose the king (or even replace him with another in exceptional circumstances) but it was made up of the elite in society and it generally chose the king from the strongest in the wider royal family. Most of us would be ceorls, but even this level had it class structure with landed gentry, tenant farmers and peasant labourers. All of those would have to give service in some form, including military, to the local lord in return for his protection. Below them were the thoews or slaves. It was the Normans, in the year 1102, who abolished slavery in medieval England.

Pre-Norman England was hardly a golden age.

DC