(c) In the ordinary case, if the tenant in chivalry neither went in person nor obtained leave from the Crown to stay away, he was in evil plight. Defaulters were “in mercy”; they sometimes forfeited their entire estates to the Crown,[[129]] and might be glad to accept such terms of pardon as a gracious King condescended to hold out to them. Sometimes, it is true, quite small amercements were inflicted; the Abbot of Pershore in 1196 escaped with an amercement of 40s.[[130]] Such leniency, however, was exceptional, and the result of special royal clemency.
The right to determine the amount of amercements to be taken lay within the province of the Barons of the Exchequer, who also judged whether or not lands had escheated by default.
Henry II. seems to have levied money in name of scutage only when actually at war—on seven occasions in all during a reign of thirty-five years; and only once at a rate exceeding 20s., if we may trust Mr. Round,[[131]] and that when he was putting forth a special effort against Toulouse. Richard I., with all his rapaciousness, levied, apparently, only four scutages during ten years, and the rate of 20s. was never exceeded even in the King’s hour of urgent need,—in 1194, when the arrears of his ransom had to be paid and preparations simultaneously made for war in Normandy.
At John’s accession, then, three rules might be regarded as having all the prescriptive force of a long unbroken tradition, namely, (1) that scutage was a reserve for extraordinary emergencies, not a normal yearly burden; (2) that the recognized maximum was 20s. per knight’s fee, while a lower rate (13s.4d. and even 10s.) had occasionally been accepted; and (3) that the payment of scutage to the King at a rate previously fixed by him acted as a complete discharge of all obligations due for that occasion.
If it can be proved that John, almost from his accession, deliberately altered all three of these well-established rules, and that too in the teeth of the keen opposition of a high-spirited baronage whose members felt that their pride and prestige as well as their money-bags were attacked, a distinct step is taken towards understanding the crisis of 1215. Such knowledge would explain why a storm, long brewing, burst in John’s reign, neither sooner nor later; and even why some of the disreputable stories told by the chroniclers and accepted by Blackstone and others, found inventors and willing believers.
It is here maintained that John did make changes in all three directions; and, further, that the incidence of this increase in feudal burdens was rendered even more unendurable by two considerations:—because at his accession there remained unpaid (particularly from the fiefs of the northern knights) large arrears of the scutages imposed in his brother’s reign,[[132]] and because in June, 1212, John drew the feudal chain tight by a drastic and galling measure. In that month he instituted a strict inquest into the amount of feudal service exigible from every estate in England, to prevent any dues escaping his wide net, and to revive all services and payments that had lapsed or were in danger of lapsing.
That he made the first two changes becomes a certainty from a glance at the table of scutages actually extorted during his reign, as these are here copied from a list compiled by a writer of authority who has no special theory to support,[[133]] viz.:
| First scutage of reign— | 1198-9— | 2 | marks per knight’s fee. | |||
| Second | " | " | 1200-1 | 2 | " | " |
| Third | " | " | 1201-2 | 2 | " | " |
| Fourth | " | " | 1202-3 | 2 | " | " |
| Fifth | " | " | 1203-4 | 2 | " | " |
| Sixth | " | " | 1204-5 | 2 | " | " |
| Seventh | " | " | 1205-6 | 20s. | " | |
| Eighth | " | " | 1209-10 | 2 | marks | " |
| Ninth | " | " | 1210-11 | 2 | " | " |
| Tenth | " | " | 1210-11 | 20s. | " | |
| Eleventh | " | " | 1213-14 | 3 | marks | " |
It will be seen that, in the very first year of his reign, John took a scutage, and that, too, at a rate above the established normal, at two marks per scutum (only once equalled, thirty years before, and then under special circumstances). Even one such exaction must have made the already sulky Crown tenants look askance.
Next year John wisely allowed them breathing space; then without a break in each of the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh years of his reign, scutages were extorted in quick succession at the high rate of two marks. If John meant to establish this as a new normal rate, he did so not without some show of reason, since that would exactly pay the wages of a knight at 8d. per diem (the rate then current), for a period of forty days (the exact term recognized by public opinion as the maximum of compulsory feudal service).