The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

Between the picture drawn in Domesday and the state of affairs which the charter of Henry I was designed to remedy, there is a difference which the short interval of time will not account for, and which testifies to the action of some skilful organizing hand working with neither justice nor mercy, hardening and sharpening all lines and points to the perfecting of a strong government.

It is unnecessary to recapitulate here all the points in which the Anglo-Saxon institutions were already approaching the feudal model; it may be assumed that the actual obligation of military service was much the same in both systems, and that even the amount of land which was bound to furnish a mounted warrior was the same however the conformity may have been produced. The heriot of the English earl or thegn was in close resemblance with the relief of the Norman count or knight. But however close the resemblance, something was now added that made the two identical. The change of the heriot to the relief implies a suspension of ownership, and carries with it the custom of "livery of seisin." The heriot was the payment of a debt from the dead man to his lord; his son succeeded him by allodial right. The relief was paid by the heir before he could obtain his father's lands; between the death of the father and livery of seisin to the son the right of the "overlord" had entered; the ownership was to a certain extent resumed, and the succession of the heir took somewhat of the character of a new grant. The right of wardship also became in the same way a reëntry, by the lord, on the profits of the estate of the minor, instead of being, as before, a protection, by the head of the kin, of the indefeasible rights of the heir, which it was the duty of the whole community to maintain.

There can be no doubt that the military tenure—the most prominent feature of historical feudalism—was itself introduced by the same gradual process which we have assumed in the case of the feudal usages in general. We have no light on the point from any original grant made by the Conqueror to a lay follower, but judging by the grants made to the churches we cannot suppose it probable that such gifts were made on any expressed condition, or accepted with a distinct pledge to provide a certain contingent of knights for the king's service. The obligation of national defence was incumbent, as of old, on all land-owners, and the customary service of one fully armed man for each five hides of land was probably the rate at which the newly endowed follower of the king would be expected to discharge his duty. The wording of the Domesday survey does not imply that in this respect the new military service differed from the old; the land is marked out, not into knights' fees, but into hides, and the number of knights to be furnished by a particular feudatory would be ascertained by inquiring the number of hides that he held, without apportioning the particular acres that were to support the particular knight.

It would undoubtedly be on the estates of the lay vassals that a more definite usage would first be adopted, and knights bound by feudal obligations to their lords receive a definite estate from them. Our earliest information, however, on this as on most points of tenure, is derived from the notices of ecclesiastical practice. Lanfranc, we are told, turned the drengs, the rent-paying tenants of his archiepiscopal estates, into knights for the defence of the country; he enfeoffed a certain number of knights who performed the military service due from the archiepiscopal barony. This had been done before the Domesday survey, and almost necessarily implies that a like measure had been taken by the lay vassals. Lanfranc likewise maintained ten knights to answer for the military service due from the convent of Christ Church, which made over to him, in consideration of the relief, land worth two hundred pounds annually. The value of the knight's fee must already have been fixed at twenty pounds a year.

In the reign of William Rufus the abbot of Ramsey obtained a charter which exempted his monastery from the service of ten knights due from it on festivals, substituting the obligation to furnish three knights to perform service on the north of the Thames—a proof that the lands of that house had not yet been divided into knights' fees. In the next reign, we may infer—from the favor granted by the King to the knights who defended their lands per loricas (that is, by the hauberk) that their demesne lands shall be exempt from pecuniary taxation—that the process of definite military infeudation had largely advanced. But it was not even yet forced on the clerical or monastic estates. When, in 1167, the abbot of Milton, in Dorset, was questioned as to the number of knights' fees for which he had to account, he replied that all the services due from his monastery were discharged out of the demesne; but he added that in the reign of Henry I, during a vacancy in the abbacy, Bishop Roger, of Salisbury, had enfeoffed two knights out of the abbey lands. He had, however, subsequently reversed the act and had restored the lands, whose tenure had been thus altered, to their original condition of rent-paying estate or "socage."