The actual amount of dispossession was no doubt greatest in the higher ranks; the smaller owners may to a large extent have remained in a mediatized position on their estates.
Continuing Feudalism in France and England,
our selection from William Stubbs. The selection is presented in seven easy 5 minute installments.
Previously in Feudalism in France and England.
Time: 9th. To 12th. Century
The actual amount of dispossession was no doubt greatest in the higher ranks; the smaller owners may to a large extent have remained in a mediatized position on their estates; but even Domesday, with all its fulness and accuracy, cannot be supposed to enumerate all the changes of the twenty eventful years that followed the battle of Hastings. It is enough for our purpose to ascertain that a universal assimilation of title followed the general changes of ownership. The king of Domesday is the supreme landlord; all the land of the nation, the old folkland, has become the king’s; and all private land is held mediately or immediately of him; all holders are bound to their lords by homage and fealty, either actually demanded or understood to be demandable, in every case of transfer by inheritance or otherwise.
The result of this process is partly legal and partly constitutional or political. The legal result is the introduction of an elaborate system of customs, tenures, rights, duties, profits and jurisdictions. The constitutional result is the creation of several intermediate links between the body of the nation and the king, in the place of or side by side with the duty of allegiance.
On the former of these points we have very insufficient data; for we are quite in the dark as to the development of feudal law in Normandy before the invasion and may be reasonably inclined to refer some at least of the peculiarities of English feudal law to the leaven of the system which it superseded. Nor is it easy to reduce the organization described in Domesday to strict conformity with feudal law as it appears later, especially with the general prevalence of military tenure.
The growth of knighthood is a subject on which the greatest obscurity prevails and the most probable explanation of its existence in England — the theory that it is a translation into Norman forms of the thegnage of the Anglo-Saxon law — can only be stated as probable.
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 reentry, 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 defense 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 defense 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.
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