The reason doubtless is that they were assessed, as the historians tell us, and as the roll itself shows, not only upon those estates from which services of the shield were explicitly due, but also upon all lands held in chief of the crown, and all church lands without distinction of tenure; the basis of assessment in all cases being the knight's fee, in its secondary sense of a parcel of land worth twenty pounds a year. Whatever the laity might think of this arrangement, the indignation of the clergy was bitter and deep. The wrong inflicted on them by the scutage of 1156 was as nothing compared with this, which set at nought all ancient precedents of ecclesiastical immunity, and actually wrung from the church lands even more than from the lay fiefs.[146]

I am obliged to quote the passage in extenso, because, in this case, the accomplished writer betrays a singular confusion of ideas, and misrepresents not only the levy, but also the point at issue. The whole passage is conceived in error, error the more strange because Miss Norgate enjoyed over her predecessors the advantage of writing with the printed roll before her. The lay estates were not, as implied ('all lands held in chief of the crown'), in any way exceptionally assessed: in no case was the basis of assessment the unit alleged by the writer; and as to the 'church lands', a reference to the roll will show that all over England there were only eight cases in which those not owing 'services of the shield' contributed (and that in no way as an assessment on imaginary knights' fees) to this levy, while in six out of the eight their contributions were so insignificant that their collective amount barely exceeded £50.[147]

The true explanation is probably to be found in the fact that only a portion of the tax was raised by way of scutage. As this great levy has been wrongly supposed to have consisted of a scutage alone,[148] and as it played an important part in the development of direct taxation, I propose to set forth, for the first time, the various methods by which the money was raised. These were eight in number:

I.(Fixed) A donum of two marcs on the fee from the under-tenants of the church, raised by fiefs on the old assessment (servitium debitum).
II.(Fixed ?) A donum of (it is said) two marcs on the fee from the under-tenants of the lay barons, raised partly by counties and partly by fiefs.
III.(Arbitrary) A donum from the church tenants-in-chief themselves, irrespective of their fees.
IV.(Arbitrary) A donum from some of the non-feudal religious houses (tenants in elemosina, and not by military service).
V.(Arbitrary) A donum from the towns.
VI.(Arbitrary) A donum from the sheriffs.
VII.(Arbitrary) A donum from the Jewries.
VIII.(Arbitrary) A donum from the moneyers.

Of these, the first was strictly regular, being merely a repetition of the scutage of 1156, at the rate of two marcs instead of twenty shillings. The second presents some difficulty. Subject to correction, there are some fifteen cases in which the payment is made separately by fiefs, and in which the rate is clearly two marcs, while there are twenty-two in which the milites of the county pay as a group through the sheriff, and in which, therefore, we cannot actually test the rate of the levy or the manner of raising it. Swereford's ipse dixit as to the rate in these latter cases was probably based on analogy, here our only guide.

With the third and fourth divisions we return to sure ground. To them I invite particular attention, because it is to them (and especially to the third) that apply the complaints of the church chroniclers, and not (as has always, but erroneously, been supposed) to the perfectly legitimate levy of two marcs on the fee. It is necessary to emphasize the fact that the matter has been wholly misunderstood. The bitter complaint of John of Salisbury that Henry, on this occasion, 'omnibus (contra antiquum morem et debitam libertatem) indixit ecclesiis ut pro arbitrio ejus satraparum suorum conferrunt in censum', would have been without meaning had it referred (as alleged) to the latter levy (or even to the insignificant sums contributed ut supra by eight foundations); but when we learn that, over and above this legitimate levy, a far larger sum was arbitrarily wrung from the church, the truth and justice of the protest are at once made evident. I here give two tables illustrative of this exaction. Each is divided into three columns. In the first column I give the number of the knights due from each bishopric and each religious house. In the second column I give the marcs due, and paid on this occasion, on the old assessment (servitium debitum). In the third will be found the exaction complained of, namely, the dona extorted from the spiritual 'barons' themselves.

SeesKnights dueDonum of Knights
(in marcs)		Donum of Tenant
(in marcs)
Winchester60120500
Lincoln60120500
Worcester60120200
Norwich4080200
Bath2040500
London2040200
Exeter17½35150
Chester1530100
Durham1020500
York714500
Total—6193,350
Religious HousesKnights dueDonum of Knights
(in marcs)		Donum of Tenant
(in marcs)
Peterborough60120100
St Edmund's4080200
Glastonbury4080—
Abingdon306060
Hyde2040150
St Augustine's1530220
St Alban's612100
Evesham51060
Wilton51020
Ramsey4860
St Benet of Hulme3630
Pershore3—7½
Chertsey3660
Cerne36—
Winchcombe247½
Middleton24—
Sherburne2—10
Abbotsbury127½
Total—4821,092½

We thus obtain a grand total of 1,101 marcs raised from the church by legitimate scutage, and 4,442½ (or, adding the dona from non-feudal houses, 4,700) marcs by special imposition.[149] This distinction at once explains the real extortion of which churchmen complained;[150] and shows that it had nothing to do with scutage, but was a special imposition on the church fees from which the lay ones were exempt.[151] The idea of the impost was not improbably the adjustment of inequalities in cases where the knight-service was a quite inadequate assessment; the precedent created was not forgotten, and it proved in later days a welcome source of revenue.