Hector Munro Chadwick in the context of "Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon"

A churl (Old High German karal), in its earliest Old English (Anglo-Saxon) meaning, was simply "a man" or more particularly a "free man", 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 nobility and royalty, "a common person". Says Chadwick:

This meaning held through the 15th century, but by then the word had taken on negative overtones, meaning "a country person" and then "a low fellow". By the 19th century, a new and pejorative meaning arose, "one inclined to uncivil or loutish behaviour"—hence "churlish" (cf. the pejorative sense of the term boor, whose original meaning of "country person" or "farmer" is preserved in Dutch and Afrikaans boer and German Bauer, although the latter has its own pejorative connotations such as those, prompting its use as the name for the chess piece known in English as a pawn; also the word villain—derived from Anglo-French and Old French, originally meaning "farmhand"—has gone through a similar process to reach its present meaning).

Some 20th-century studies of oral poetry and traditional literature postulate Heroic Ages as stages in the development of human societies likely to give rise to legends about heroic deeds. According to some theorists, oral epic poetry would originate during an Heroic Age, and would be transmitted, by singers who displayed less creativity, through later periods. Scholars who adopted Heroic Age theories include:

• Maurice Bowra (1898–1971)
• Hector Munro Chadwick (1870–1947) and Nora Kershaw Chadwick (1891–1972)

A widely-shared view was that each society would pass through a Heroic Age only once. This apparently explains why, in the Chadwicks' survey of world-wide oral and traditional poetry, The Growth of Literature (published 1932–1940),medieval European epics such as the French Chansons de geste and the Spanish Cantar de Mio Cid are omitted: those societies are taken to have passed through a Heroic Age earlier.