Lastly, we have the return in the Black Book (1166):
Homines faciunt iiii. milites in communi in servitium domini regis, ita quod tota terra abbatiae communicata est cum eis per hidas ad prædictum servitium faciendum.
Prof Maitland, writing on the Court of the Abbey of Ramsey, in the thirteenth century, observes that:
The Abbot is bound to provide four knights, and (contrary to what is thought to have been the common practice) he has not split up his land into knights' fees so that on every occasion the same four tenants shall go to the war ... the process by which the country was carved out into knights' fees seems in this case to have been arrested at an early stage.[225]
The case of Ramsey was undoubtedly peculiar, but in the third volume of the Cartulary, now published, we have (pp. 48, 218) fuller versions of the Abbot's return in 1166. The second of these is specially noteworthy, and reads like a transcript of the original return.[226] Here we see separate knights' fees duly entered, with the customary formula 'debet unum militem'. But the service was certainly provided in 1166 and afterwards 'per hidas'. Further inquiry, therefore, is needed; but we have in any case, for Ramsey, a chain of evidence which should prove of considerable value for the study of this difficult problem.
The phenomenon, however, for which we have to account is the appearance from the earliest period to which our information extends of certain quotas of knight-service, clearly arbitrary in amount, as due from those bishops and abbots who held by military service. When and how were these quotas fixed? The answer is given by Matthew Paris—one of the last quarters in which one would think of looking—where we read that, in 1070, the Conqueror
episcopatus quoque et abbatias omnes quae baronias tenebant, et eatenus ab omni servitute seculari libertatem habuerant, sub servitute statuit militari, inrotulans episcopatus et abbatias pro voluntate sua quot milites sibi et successoribus suis hostilitatis tempore voluit a singulis exhiberi (Historia Anglorum, i. 13).
This passage (which perhaps represents the St Albans tradition) is dismissed by Dr Stubbs as being probably 'a mistaken account of the effects of the Domesday Survey'.[227]