If John could ask so much, what prevented him asking more? He might name a prohibitive price, and so defeat the hereditability of fiefs altogether. Such arbitrary exactions must end, so the barons were determined in 1215; custom must be defined, so as to prevail henceforth against royal discretion. The first demand of the Articles of the Barons is, “that heirs of full age shall have their heritage by the ancient relief to be set forth in the Charter.” Here it is, then, duly set forth and defined in chapter 2 of Magna Carta as £100 for an "earl’s barony," £100 for "a baron’s barony," 100s. for a knight’s fee, and a proportional part of 100s. for every fraction of a knight’s fee. This clause produced the desired effect. These rates were strictly observed by the exchequer of Henry III., as we know from the Pipe Rolls of his reign. Thus, when a certain William Pantoll was charged with £100 for his relief on the mistaken supposition that he held a “barony,” he protested that he held only five knight’s fees, and got off with the payment of £25.[[357]] The relief of a barony was subsequently reduced from £100 to 100 marks. The date of this change, if we may rely on Madox,[[358]] lies between the twenty-first and thirty-fifth years of Edward I.[[359]]
Apparently all who paid reliefs to the king were mulcted in a further payment (calculated at 9 per cent. of the relief) in name of "Queen’s Gold," a contribution to the private purse of the Queen Consort, and collected by an official specially representing her at the exchequer.[[360]]
The Charter deals only with tenure by knight’s service; nothing is said of other tenures. The explanation of the omission may possibly be different in the cases of socage and of serjeanty respectively.[[361]] (a) Socage. The barons were not so vitally interested in socage, that being, in the normal case, the tenure of humbler men.[[362]] In later reigns the king, like an ordinary mesne lord, contented himself with one year’s rent of socage lands in name of relief. (b) Serjeanty. The barons cannot have been indifferent to the fate of serjeanties, since many of them held great estates by such tenures. Possibly they assumed that the rules applied to knights’ fees and baronies would apply to serjeanties as well. The Crown, however, acted on a different view; large sums were frequently extorted by Henry III. By the reign of Edward I., however, the practice of the exchequer was to limit itself to one year’s rent (a sufficiently severe exaction)[[363]] for serjeanties, which thus fell into line with socage.[[364]]
II. Units of Assessment. Some explanation is required of the three groups into which crown estates were thus divided—knight’s fees, barons’ baronies, and earls’ baronies.
(1) Feodum militis integrum. The origin of the knight’s fee is obscured by a network of conflicting theories. A thread of connection is sometimes traced between it and the mysterious five-hide unit of Anglo-Saxon times; other authorities would ascribe its introduction into England to a definite act of some great personage—either William the Conqueror, according to Selden, who founds on a well-known but untrustworthy passage in Ordericus Vitalis, or Ranulf Flambard, according to Freeman, Stubbs, and Gneist. It seems probable that the Normans, here as elsewhere, pursued their policy of avoiding an open rupture with the past, and that the Conqueror adapted as far as possible the existing system of land tenure to his own needs. There is little doubt, in light of the evidence accumulated by Mr. Round in his Feudal England, that William I. stipulated verbally for the service of a definite number of knights from every fief bestowed by him on his Norman followers. A knight’s fee or scutum thus became a measure of military service, and of feudal assessment; servitium unius militis was a well-known legal unit. But a difficult problem arises when it is asked what definite equation, if any, existed between land and service. Three answers have been given: (a) A definite ratio exists between amount of service and extent of ground. In other words, the knight’s fee contains a fixed area of land; every five hides sent one warrior, thus preserving the old Anglo-Saxon unit.[[365]] (b) The ratio lies not between service and extent, but between service and value. An estate of £20 annual rental sends one knight to the king’s wars; the normal knight’s fee contains 20 librates of land.[[366]] (c) Other authorities deny that any proportion exists at all: William the Conqueror exacted from each of his grantees precisely as much or as little knight’s service as he saw fit.
Is it not possible to reconcile these divergent conclusions? Undoubtedly the Conqueror held himself bound by no fixed rules, but made exceptions where he pleased: some favoured foundations were exempt from all service whatsoever.[[367]] Yet, if he distributed estates at his own free will, he did not necessarily distribute them irrationally or at random. He demanded service of knights in round numbers, 5 or 10 or 20, as he saw cause, and in normal cases he was guided by some loose sense of proportion. Where there was no reason either for preferential treatment or for special severity, service would be roughly proportionate either to the area or to the value. This rule was William’s servant, not his master, and was made to yield to many exceptions, which would amply account for the existence in later days of knight’s fees varying from 2 hides to 14 hides, instead of the normal 5.[[368]] Each such fee, whatever its acreage or its rental, owed the service of one knight, and paid relief at 100s.
(2) Baronia integra. The word “barony” cannot be easily defined, on account of the many changes it has undergone.[[369]] A “barony” at the Norman Conquest differed in almost every respect from a “barony” at the present day. The word baro was originally synonymous with homo, meaning, in feudal usage, a vassal of any lord. It soon became usual, however, to confine the word to king’s men; “barones” were thus identical with "crown tenants"—a considerable body at first; but a new distinction soon arose between the great men and the smaller men among their number (between barones majores and barones minores). The latter were usually called knights (milites), while “baron” was reserved for the holder of an “honour.”[[370]] For determining what constituted an “honour,” however, it was impossible to lay down any absolute criterion. Mere size was not sufficient: a magnate once classed as a full “baron” might successfully claim to be only a “knight,” thus lightening some of his feudal burdens, for example this one of “reliefs.” Chapter 14 of Magna Carta helped to stereotype the division, since it stipulated that each major baro should receive an individual writ of summons to the Council, leaving the barones minores to be convened collectively through the sheriff. As the one point of certainty, where everything else was vague, these writs came to possess an exaggerated importance, and it was finally held (at a date long subsequent to Magna Carta) that the mere receipt of a special summons, if acted upon, made the recipient a baron, and entitled his heirs, in all time coming, to succeed him in what was fast hardening into a recognized title of dignity. The “barons” in 1215 knew nothing of all this; they desired merely to have the reliefs due by them taxed at a fixed rate. Each “barony” should pay £100, a sum afterwards reduced to 100 marks.
Relief was thereafter a fixed sum, while the size of the barony varied in each case. As the same holds true of the knight’s fee, it is doubly ridiculous to attempt to discover an equation between the knight’s fee and the barony founded upon the ratio of the sums payable. Coke, however, was guilty of this absurdity.[[371]]
(3) Baronia comitis integra. A peculiar phrase is used in the text, an "earl’s barony" appearing where “earldom” might be expected.[[372]] The reason is that “earldom” originally implied the holding of an office and not the ownership of land, whereas relief was payable for the earl’s lands or “honour,” not for his office. The Charter, therefore, uses words well fitted to make its meaning clear. The earl (or comes) was the successor of the ealdorman as local governor of a county or group of counties. His title was official, not tenurial, or even, in early times, necessarily hereditary.
Some of the ideas most intimately connected with a modern earldom were signally inappropriate to the Norman earls. At the present day an earldom is one of several “steps in the peerage,” a conception that did not then exist. At the present day it carries with it a seat in the House of Lords, whereas no instance is recorded until long after the Norman Conquest of any earl or other great man demanding as a right to be present in the king’s council: the custom of summoning all crown tenants became stereotyped only in the reign of Henry II. and was not formally recognized previous to chapter 14 of Magna Carta. At the present day, again, the hereditary principle is the chief feature of an earldom, whereas William did not admit that the office necessarily passed from father to son.[[373]]