Feudal England: Historical Studies on the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

by John Horace Round

The number of hides which the knight's fee contained being known, the number of knights' fees in any particular holding could be easily discovered.[33] All the imposts of the ... Norman reigns, were, so far as we know, raised on the land, and according to computation by the hide: ... the feudal exactions by way of aid ... were levied on the hide.[34]

It cannot even be granted that a definite area of land was necessary to constitute a knight's fee; ... It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the extent of a knight's fee was determined by rent and valuation rather than acreage, and that the common quantity was really expressed in the twenty librates, etc.[35] The variation in the number of hides contained in the knight's fee.[36]

Mr Freeman's views need not detain us, for he unhesitatingly accepts Dr Stubbs' arguments as proving that the Norman military tenure was based on 'the old service of a man from each five hides of land'.[³⁷]

We find then, I submit, that the recognized leaders of existing opinion on the subject cannot agree among themselves in giving us a clear answer, when we ask them what determined the amount of 'service' due from a Norman tenant-in-chief, or, in other words, how that 'service' was developed in unbroken continuity from Anglo-Saxon obligations.

The third point that I would raise is this. Even assuming that the amount of 'service' bore a fixed proportion—whether in pecuniary or territorial units—to the extent of possession, we are, surely, at once confronted by the difficulty that the owner of x units of possession would be compelled, for the discharge of his military obligations, to enfeoff x knights, assigning a 'unit' to each. A tenant-in-chief, to take a concrete instance, whose fief was worth £100 a year, would have to provide ex hypothesi five knights; if, as was quite usual, he enfeoffed the full number, he would have to assign to each knight twenty librates of land (which I may at once, though anticipating, admit was the normal value of a knight's fee), that is to say, the crown would have forestalled Henry George, and the luckless baro would see the entire value of his estate swallowed up in the discharge of its obligations.[³⁸] What his position would be in cases where, as often, he enfeoffed more knights than he required, arithmetic is unable to determine. I cannot understand how this obvious difficulty has been so strangely overlooked.

The fourth and last criticism which I propose to offer on the subject is this. If we find that under Henry II—when we meet with definite information—a fief contained, as we might expect, more 'units of possession' than it was bound to furnish knights (thus leaving a balance over for the baro after sub-infeudation), we must draw one of two conclusions: either this excess had existed from the first; or, if the fief (as we are asked to believe) was originally assessed up to the hilt for military service, that assessment must, in the interval, have been reduced. In other words, Henry I—if, as Dr Stubbs in one place suggests,[³⁹] he was the first to take a 'regular account of the knights' fees'—must have found the land with a settled liability of providing one knight for every five hides, and must, yet, have reduced that liability of his own accord, on the most sweeping scale, thus, contrary to all his principles, ultroneously deprived himself of the 'service' he was entitled to claim.

Having completed my criticisms of the accepted view, and set forth its chief difficulties, I shall now propound the theory to which my own researches have led me, following the same method of proof as that adopted by Mr Seebohm in his English Village Community, namely working back from the known to the relatively unknown, till the light thrown upwards by the records of the twelfth century illumines the language of Domesday and renders the allusions of monks and chroniclers pregnant with meaning.

1. THE 'CARTAE' OF 1166

In the formal returns (cartae) made to the exchequer in 1166 by the tenants-in-chief (barones) of England, of which the official transcripts are preserved in the Liber Niger and the Liber Rubeus, we have our earliest glimpse of the organization of that purely feudal host among whom our lands had been parcelled out to be held, as I shall show, by military service. We have, therefore, in them our best starting-point for an inquiry into the origin and growth of military tenure in England.

It may be well perhaps, at the very outset, to contrast these cartae of 1166 with those of the Domesday Inquest eighty years before.[⁴⁰] For the essentially feudal character of the former is at once, by the comparison, thrown into relief. The original returns of the Domesday Inquest were made Hundred by Hundred; those of 1166 were made fief by fief. The former were made by the jurors of the Hundred-court; the latter by the lord of the fief. Thus, while the one took for its unit the oldest and most familiar of native organizations, the other, ignoring not only the Hundred, but even the shire itself, took for its unit the alien organization of the fief.[⁴¹] The one inquest strictly continued, the other wholly repudiated, the Anglo-Saxon system.