KNIGHTHOOD 113
employed. But even the word "miles" had not as yet acquired the special meaning which was subsequently assigned to it. Among the "milites" of Domesday are persons of very various conditions, from ordinary soldiers and the inferior tenants of manors to Hamo the sheriff and the earl of Eu.[1] But when the returns contained in the Black Book of the Exchequer were made in the reign of Henry II., both the principle and system of knights' fees were fully and definitively established. Hence this change must have been effected in the interval between the compilation of these two records. It cannot be supposed that the numerous grants of land made by William I. to his adherents were exempt from military obligation of one kind or another. But no original grant of his or of either of his immediate successors to any lay vassal is in existence to inform us what the exact nature of those military obligations was; and, arguing from the grants to various ecclesiastical vassals, Dr Stubbs regards it as unlikely 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.[2] Before the Norman Conquest, he contends, all landholders having been bound to the duty of national defence, and a certain quantity of land having customarily furnished a fully armed mat), the old rate of military obligation was in all probability continued in the ease of the new grantees after the Conquest. Nothing in Domesday implies that the conditions of military service differed under the old and the new monarchy, and hence Dr Stubbs concludes that "the form in which 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." And, although Selden, and Madox after him, adhere to the common and ancient tradition that William the Conqueror made his grants conditional on the service of some particular number of knights in every case, they substantially agree in regarding the knight's fee in its special meaning as the consequence of subinfeudation. From the reign of Henry II. to the reign of Edward I., indeed, what may be called grants in gross from the king and grants in detail from the mesne lords were the ordinary methods of erecting knights' fees and providing for the discharge of the personal and pecuniary obligations with which they were burdened.
Although the feudal services and incidents of a knight's fee appear to have been ascertained with perfect clearness, the exact nature of a knight's fee itself – what it was or in what it consisted – has been the subject of a great deal of controversy. As the demands both personal and pecuniary which were made on the holder of each knight's fee were uniform, it is reasonable to conclude that all such fees were in some way equivalent to one another. But whether their equivalence was inferred from the quantity of land they contained or from the amount of revenue derived from them has been much debated, and cannot be said to be even now finally settled. Selden, indeed, roundly affirms that "the legal value of knights' fees was never in truth estimable either by any certain number of acres or quantity of revenue (though some have erroneously determined them by both), but only by the services or number of knights reserved."[3] But if this were the case it is difficult to understand how parts of a knight's fee such as a half or a third could have been held, as they unquestionably were held, under reduced burdens calculated in proportion to the full burdens of a whole knight's fee. According to the analogies of the Anglo-Norman policy in other departments of its manifestation, it might have been expected with some degree of confidence that the knight's fee would have been a combination of the property qualification of the thegn and the feudal attributes of the "fief de haubere," that is, of the latter superinduced upon the former. Before the Norman Conquest the property qualification of a thegn was five hides of land, for which a fully equipped warrior was to be furnished for the national defence in the king's host or "fyrd"; and there is no evidence to rebut the presumption that after the Norman Conquest a similar rate of military obligation was continued. It is not, however, without hesitation that Dr Stubbs arrives at what seems to be rather a provisional than a final determination on the subject. In one passage he observes that "the name of thegn covers the whole class which after the Conquest appears under the name of knights, with the same qualification in land and nearly the same obligations."[4] In another passage, on the contrary, he says that "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 particular knight's fee is given exactly, it affords no ground for such a conclusion."[5] On the whole he thinks it must be held that its extent was determined not by acreage but by rent or valuation, 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." That this was the established appraisement of the knight's fee very soon after the Norman Conquest Dr Stubbs infers from the circumstance that Archbishop Lanfranc maintained ten knights to answer for the military service due from the convent of Christ Church in consideration of land worth two hundred pounds a year which on that account was assigned to him.[6] But, although, as Coke says, the annual value of a knight's fee was twenty pounds at the enactment of both Magna Charts and the statute "De Militibus," he cites various writs for distraint of knighthood which, if indeed some of them were not merely writs of array, would show that it varied irregularly from ten to forty pounds in amount between the reigns of Edward I. and Henry VI.[7] It was computed at forty pounds in the reign of Elizabeth, and again when Charles I. resorted to "knight-money" as a means of raising a revenue. The aggregate number of knights' fees throughout England in feudal times is very variously stated by tradition. The assertion of Ordericus Vitalis in the reign of Stephen that the Conqueror settled his military fiefs so as to provide 60,000 knights for his service was accepted, not only
- ↑ Ellis, General Introduction to Domesday, vol. i. p. 58 sq., where examples are noticed. "There is no ground," says Mr Freeman, "for thinking that William directly or systematically introduced any new kind of tenure into the holding of English lands. There is nothing to suggest any such belief either in the chronicles of his reign, in the survey which is his greatest monument, in the genuine, or even in the spurious, remains of his legislation. The code of laws which bears William's name, but which is assuredly none of his enacting, is in all but a very few points a mere confirmation of the old English law. And the few points of innovation have nothing to do with feudal tenures. But when we come to the reign next but one we are met by a document which shows us that within thirteen years after the Conqueror's death not only the military tenures but the worst abuses of the military tenures were in full force in England. The great charter of Henry I., the groundwork of the greater charter of John, and thereby the groundwork of all later English legislation, is filled with promises to abolish the very same class of abuses which were at last swept away by the famous statute of Charles II." (Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. v. p. 372 sq.; Palgrave, Normandy and England, vol. iii. p. 609 sq.; Digby, History of the Law of Real Property, p. 31).
- ↑ Stubbs, Con. Hist., vol. i. p. 261 sq.
- ↑ Titles of Honor, p. 613.
- ↑ Stubbs, Con. Hist., vol. i. p. 156.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 264 sq.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 262.
- ↑ Coke, Second Institute, p. 596, ed. 1669.
