A thane was a kind of lord in early England and in early Scotland — roughly from the years before 1066. He held land from the king, and in return he fought for the king and brought his own men to the fighting. In rank he sat below an earl but clearly above an ordinary farmer, and later writers often place him below a knight, though "knight" belongs to a slightly later world and the two do not line up neatly. That untidiness is honest: old ranks changed over the centuries, and the word covered somewhat different men in different places and times. Today the word is history-book English and story English. Most people who know it at all know it from Shakespeare's *Macbeth*, where Macbeth is called Thane of Glamis and Thane of Cawdor — in Scotland the title was tied to a place, so a thane was a thane *of* somewhere. You will also meet it in fantasy novels and games, which borrow it for its old, weighty sound. Nobody is a thane now; there is no modern job with this name. You may also see it spelled thegn in books about Old English, which is the older spelling of the same word.