Feudalism – 4

It is most probable that no regular account of the knights’ fees was ever taken until they became liable to taxation.

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

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.”

The very term “the new feoffment,” which was applied to the knights’ fees created between the death of Henry I and the year in which the account preserved in the Black Book of the exchequer was taken, proves that the process was going on for nearly a hundred years and that the form in which the knights’ fees appear when called on by Henry II for “scutage” was most probably the result of a series of compositions by which the great vassals relieved their lands from a general burden by carving out particular estates, the holders of which performed the services due from the whole; it was a matter of convenience and not of tyrannical pressure. The statement of Ordericus Vitalis that the Conqueror “distributed lands to his knights in such fashion that the kingdom of England should have forever sixty thousand knights and furnish them at the king’s command according to the occasion,” must be regarded as one of the many numerical exaggerations of the early historians. The officers of the exchequer in the twelfth century were quite unable to fix the number of existing knights’ fees.

It cannot even be granted that a definite area of land was necessary to constitute a knight’s fee; for although at a later period and in local computations we may find four or five hides adopted as a basis of calculation, where the extent of the particular knight’s fee is given exactly, it affords no ground for such a conclusion. In the Liber Niger we find knights’ fees of two hides and a half, of two hides, of four, five and six hides. Geoffrey Ridel states that his father held one hundred and eighty-four carucates and a virgate, for which the service of fifteen knights was due but that no knights’ fees had been carved out of it, the obligation lying equally on every carucate. The archbishop of York had far more knights than his tenure required. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the extent of a knight’s fee was determined by rent or valuation rather than acreage and that the common quantity was really expressed in the twenty librates, the twenty pounds’ worth of annual value which until the reign of Edward I was the qualification for knighthood.

It is most probable that no regular account of the knights’ fees was ever taken until they became liable to taxation, either in the form of auxilium militum under Henry I or in that of scutage under his grandson. The facts, however, which are here adduced, preclude the possibility of referring this portion of the feudal innovations to the direct legislation of the Conqueror. It may be regarded as a secondary question whether the knighthood here referred to was completed by the investiture with knightly arms and the honorable accolade. The ceremonial of knighthood was practiced by the Normans, whereas the evidence that the English had retained the primitive practice of investing the youthful warrior is insufficient; yet it would be rash to infer that so early as this, if indeed it ever was the case, every possessor of a knight’s fee received formal initiation before he assumed his spurs. But every such analogy would make the process of transition easier and prevent the necessity of any general legislative act of change.

It has been maintained that a formal and definitive act, forming the initial point of the feudalization of England, is to be found in a clause of the laws, as they are called, of the Conqueror; which directs that every freeman shall affirm, by covenant and oath, that “he will be faithful to King William within England and without, will join him in preserving his lands and honor with all fidelity and defend him against his enemies.” But this injunction is little more than the demand of the oath of allegiance which had been taken to the Anglo-Saxon kings and is here required not of every feudal dependent of the King but of every freeman or freeholder whatsoever.

In that famous council of Salisbury of 1086, which was summoned immediately after the making of the Domesday survey, we learn from the Chronicle that there came to the King “all his witan and all the landholders of substance in England whose vassals who soever they were and they all submitted to him and became his men and swore oaths of allegiance that they would be faithful to him against all others.” In this act have been seen the formal acceptance and date of the introduction of feudalism but it has a very different meaning. The oath described is the oath of allegiance, combined with the act of homage and obtained from all land-owners, whoever their feudal lord might be. It is a measure of precaution taken against the disintegrating power of feudalism, providing a direct tie between the sovereign and all freeholders which no inferior relation existing between them and the mesne lords would justify them in breaking. The real importance of the passage as bearing on the date of the introduction of feudal tenure is merely that it shows the system to have already become consolidated; all the land-owners of the kingdom had already become, somehow or other, vassals, either of the king or of some tenant under him. The lesson may be learned from the fact of the Domesday survey.

Continued.

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