The term thegn (thane or thayn in Shakespearean English), from Old English þegn, ðegn, "servant, attendant, retainer", "one who serves",[1] is commonly used to describe either an aristocratic retainer of a king or nobleman in Anglo-Saxon England, or, as a class term, the majority of the aristocracy below the ranks of ealdormen and high-reeves. It is also the term for an early medieval Scandinavian class of retainers.

A churl (etymologically the same name as Charles / Carl and Old High German karal), in its earliest Old English (Anglo-Saxon) meaning, was simply "a man", and more particularly a "husband",[1] but the word soon came to mean "a non-servile peasant", still spelled ċeorl(e), and denoting the lowest rank of freemen. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it later came to mean the opposite of the nobility and royalty, "a common person". Says Chadwick:

the distinction between thegn and ceorl is from the time of Aethelstan, the broad line of demarcation between the classes of society.