KNIGHTHOOD 115
tenant in chivalry who was thereunto commanded by the king's writ subjected the offender, if he was capable of bearing arms, and between the ages of twenty-one and sixty, to a fine. And thus in the progress of events knight-service tended to become more and more divorced from its primary uses and intentions, and to survive merely as a series of oppressive exactions and idle ceremonies. During the centuries which followed the enactment of the statute of "Quia Emptores," the king gradually added the character of immediate lord over nearly all the lands held in chivalry within the realm to the character of lord paramount which had been his from the beginning. When feudalism was as firmly established and as fully developed as it ever was in England, a single officer in each county, called the king's escheator, who was appointed annually by the lord treasurer, was considered sufficient to watch over the royal "droits of seignory" and to prevent the evasion of them. But when nothing save the name and the hard ships of feudalism remained, the Court of Wards and Liveries was erected, and the scandals and abuses to which its jurisdiction gave rise under the Tudors and the first two Stuarts speedily assumed the proportions of an almost intolerable grievance. Towards the end of the reign of James I. the general discontent resulted in an attempt to abolish tenures in chivalry altogether, compensation being proposed to the king and the mesne lords in the form of a fixed rent in the place of their feudal dues, "which motion, though it proceeded not to effect," says Coke, "yet we thought it well to remember, hoping that so good a motion ... will some time or other ... take effect and be established."[1] This hope was in part realized by the Long Parliament, which by resolution of both Houses in 1645 put an end to the Court of Wards and Liveries, and converted all tenures in chivalry into free and common soccage. But it was not until eleven years later that, by an Act of the Commonwealth in 1656, legislative sanction was conferred on these ordinances. Their substance, however, had been embodied in one of the articles of the treaty of Newport between Charles I. and the Parliamentarians, and the king was then to have been indemnified by means of a revenue charged on the lands relieved, amounting to a hundred thousand pounds a year. At the Restoration a tax on lands held in chivalry was proposed in place of knight-service, but an alternative scheme for an excise on beer and some other liquors received the preference. It was not, however, until the abolition of purveyance as well as knight-service had been included in the measure, since known as the 12th Charles II. cap. 24, by way of concession to the claims of the yeomanry and peasantry, that it was permitted to pass, and then only amid vigorous protests from many quarters.
Regarded as a method of military organization, the feudal system of tenures was always far better adapted to the purposes of defensive than of offensive warfare. Against invasion it furnished a permanent provision both in men-at-arms and strongholds; nor was it unsuited for the campaigns of neighbouring counts and barons which lasted for only a few weeks, and extended over only a few leagues. But when kings and kingdoms were in conflict, and distant and prolonged expeditions became necessary, it was speedily discovered that the unassisted resources of feudalism were altogether inadequate. The barons and knights who fought on horseback were in their own country attended by the yeomen and townsmen who fought on foot. But in foreign wars the feudal cavalry alone were available, and the infantry were nearly all and always mercenary troops. Again, although the period for which the holders of fiefs were bound to military service had originally been uncertain and unlimited, it gradually became an established rule, to which the exceptions were everywhere trifling and rare, that it should be restricted in various countries to from forty to sixty days in each year.[2] Hence warlike operations on anything like an extended scale would have been impossible if the terms of the feudal engagement had been strictly observed. In these circumstances it became customary to retain the feudal tenants under arms as stipendiaries after their ordinary and legitimate obligations had been fulfilled. But this arrangement was exceedingly inconvenient in practice to sovereigns and their feudatories alike. It implied to the former the expenditure of large sums of money, then very difficult to raise, on what was frequently an inferior commodity, and to the latter the neglect of their estates and of all their peaceful duties and diversions. It became therefore the manifest interest of both parties that personal services should be commuted into pecuniary payments. In the early times of feudalism the refusal or omission to discharge the military obligations attached to a fief entailed immediate forfeiture. But the usage of fining the delinquents in such cases, at first arbitrarily and afterwards in a fixed amount, grew up all over Europe, while in England from the reign of Henry II. to the reign of Edward II. escuage or scutage was regularly levied, originally as an amerciament and subsequently as an ordinary war-tax on tenants by knight-service.[3] In this way funds for war were placed at the free disposal of sovereigns, and, although the feudatories and their retainers still formed the most considerable portion of their armies, the conditions under which they served were altogether changed. Their military service was now the result of special agreement, by which they undertook in consideration of certain payments to themselves and their followers, with whom they had entered into similar arrangements, to attend in a particular war or campaign with a retinue of stipulated composition and strength. In the reign of Edward I., whose warlike enterprises after he was king were confined within the four seas, this alteration does not seem to have proceeded very far, and Scotland and Wales were subjugated by what was in the main if not exclusively a feudal militia raised as of old by writ to the earls and barons and the sheriffs.[4] But the armies of Edward III., Henry V., and Henry VI. during the century of intermittent warfare between England and France were recruited and sustained entirely on the principle of contract. On the Continent the systematic employment of mercenaries was both an early and a common practice. But the transition from the feudal régime to the regime of standing armies was every where sudden and abrupt as compared with the same process among ourselves.
The crusades.
Besides consideration for the mutual convenience of sovereigns and their feudatories, there were other causes which materially contributed towards bringing about the changes in the military system of Europe which were finally accomplished in the 13th and 14th centuries. During the crusades vast armies were set on foot in which feudal rights and obligations had no place, and it was
- ↑ Institutes 4, vol. iii. p. 203.
- ↑ Du Gauge, Gloss., s.v. "Hostis"; Brussel, Usage Général des Fiefs, p. 162 sq.
- ↑ Henry II. adopted the knight's fee instead of the hide as the basis of rating (in levying taxes) for the knights and barons, and under him escuage or scutage became "an honourable commutation for personal service." Littleton defines knight-service as tenure by "homage, fealty, and escuage"; and, although scutage may have been the name for the personal service represented by the tax, it had of course long been replaced by the tax itself when he wrote in the reign of Henry VI. See Coke-Littleton, bk. ii. chap. 4, sect. 103; Madox, Baronia Anglica, pp. 216-226; Pearson, Early and Middle Ages, vol. i. p. 591; Stubbs, Constitutional History, vol. i. pp. 581-590.
- ↑ Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. ii. p. 278; also compare Grose, Military Antiquities, vol. i. p. 65 sq.
