chapter 5, sections. 48-49.

EARL.

"The title of earl had begun to supplant that of ealdorman in the reign of Ethelred; and the Danish jarl, from whom its use in this sense was borrowed, seems to have been more certainly connected by the tie of comitatus with his king than the Anglo-Saxon ealdorman need be supposed to have been."

_William Stubbs, Constitutional History of England,