bularia consisted of ten knights, and that the Normans, were already, at the time of the Conquest, acquainted with the military unit of ten knights. It was natural that the demands of the king from his barons should be based, not with exactitude on their resources, which, moreover, it was impossible for him to know with complete precision, put on the necessities and customs of the military system. As against the theory that the military obligation of the Anglo-Norman tenant-in-chief was determined by the assessment of his holding, whether in hidage or in value, I maintain that the extent of that obligation was not determined by his holding, but was fixed in relation to, and expressed in terms of, the constabularia of ten knights, the unit of the feudal host. And I, consequently, hold that his military service was in no way derived or developed from that of the Anglo-Saxons, but was arbitrarily fixed by the king, from whom he received his fief." We believe, with Mr. Round, that this solution is correct, and that it removes all difficulties."

Origin of the

two series of

66

To go back to the question which has drawn us into following Mr. Round in his long discussion, we see that the origin of military tenure or tenure by knight service is a double one: military holdings the barony was as a general rule a military holding conferred by the king from the first days of the Conquest, in return for the service of so many knights; the lands enfeoffed by the barons to knights in order to be able to fulfil the said obligation towards the king constituted a second series of military holdings.1

This second series was formed slowly, gradually, as Stubbs says, and the crown only began to concern itself directly with them and claim to regulate the number of these sub-tenancies after the lapse of a century, at the time of the inquest of 1166, at a moment when the

1. Mr. Round, pp. 293 sqq., admits that the knight's fee was normally an estate yielding an annual revenue of 20 pounds.

tax for the redemption of service, the scutage of one or two marks on the knight's fee attracted the attention of the financiers of the exchequer. It seems as if the inquest of 1166 might have given military tenure a precision and stability which it had not as yet; but the fiscal aims which the officials of the Exchequer pursued were very soon to take from tenure by knight service its primitive reason for existence and its true character. In the thirteenth century military tenure will be simply the tenure which involves payment of scutage; thus it began to decline from the time it was regularised, a fairly frequent phenomenon in the history of institutions.

Mr. Maitland's

theory respecting Anglo-Saxon

What view are we to take now as regards the links some have sought to discover between the Norman military tenure and the service of the Anglo-Saxon thegn? Mr. Round rejects every idea of filiation, and even declares military service that his theory on the introduction of knight service into England opens the way to the examination, on a fresh basis, of kindred problems, which should be viewed from the feudal point of view, and not with the set purpose of seeing Anglo-Saxon influences everywhere. Mr. Maitland, who has since published his Domesday Book and Beyond, and the second edition of his History of English Law, admits, as proved in the "convincing papers" of Mr. Round, that the number of knights furnished by each barony was actually fixed by William the Conqueror. But he questions whether the Normans really thus introduced into England a principle which was not already applied there. Even the notion of a contract between him who receives a piece of land and him who gives it in return for military service was not foreign to the English. The ecclesiastical administrators who granted land to thegns were not squandering the fortune of the saints for nothing: they evidently intended to provide themselves with the warriors whom

their land owed to the king. Such a state of things might adapt itself to a feudal explanation; perhaps even it might give rise to it. We do not know what system was practised in the east of Saxon England, where the seignorial power was weak; but in the west the substance even of the knight's fee already existed. The Bishop of Worcester held 300 hides over which he had sac and soc; he had to furnish 60 milites; now at the beginning of the reign of Henry II., it is the same number of 60 knights which is imposed upon him.1

No direct influence upon

service in the host

We find it difficult and even somewhat futile to choose between the view of Mr. Round and that of Mr. Maitland. It is probable that the Normans, at the moment of the Conquest, were entirely Anglo-Norman ignorant of the very complex and varied institutions of the Anglo-Saxons, and that, if they had found nothing in England analogous to the feudal system, they would none the less have imposed their feudal ideas and customs, conquerors as they were, and but little capable, moreover, of rapidly grasping new social and political forms. On this ground, and if we ask ourselves for what reasons William the Conqueror brought over into England the system of service in the host as it existed in France, Mr. Round may quite legitimately deny all filiation between tenure by knight-service and the five hides of the thegn about which, doubtless, the Conqueror did not trouble himself.2

But England was prepared by her past to receive and develop the feudal organisation on her soil. She was

1. Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 156 sqq.; see also pp. 294, 307309, 317. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, i, pp. 258-259.

2. King's thegns still exist in the reign of William the Conqueror. But they do not rank with the tenants-in-chief by military service. In Domesday they are placed after the serjeants of the shire. As a distinct social class, they disappear during the reigns of the Conqueror's sons. (See the article by F. M. Stenton on the Domesday of the county of Derby in Vict. History of Derbyshire, i, 1905, p. 307).

E

The feudal régime finds a favourable soil for original development

acquainted with commendation, with land held from a lord or from several lords superimposed, with military service due to a lord; under the form of the heriot, she was acquainted even with the right of relief; seignorial justice was widely established.1 England, therefore, easily accepted the seignorial and feudal régime; but of necessity she impressed her stamp upon it. Anglo-Norman society in the twelfth century differed from French society in very important points. Words and things show this clearly; tenure in socage, which little by little absorbed all the free tenures of the Middle Ages and still exists to-day, is an Anglo-Saxon term and is derived from the status of the sochemanni. It has been said that the Anglo-Saxon régime had only produced dismemberment and anarchy, and that the Norman Conquest arrested this disintegration by the introduction of the feudal system; but did not this dismemberment and this anarchy proclaim the spontaneous formation of a native feudal system? What the Norman Conquest brought to England, which England had not at all, either in reality or germ, was not feudalism, it was a monarchic despotism based on administrative centralisation.

1. Mr. Round in the studies which the editors of the Victoria History are publishing, insists on the divergences between the Norman feudal system and Anglo-Saxon institutions (Victoria History of Surrey, i, 1902, p. 288, Hertfordshire, i, 1902, p. 278; Buckinghamshire, i, 1905, p. 218). Mr. Maitland, however, does not pretend to deny these divergences.

67

VIII.

THE ORIGIN OF THE TOWNS IN ENGLAND.

question

THERE exists no satisfactory general account of the origin of the towns in England.1 The pages devoted to this question by Stubbs, in three of the Novelty of the chapters of Vol. I.,2 have long been the safest guide to consult. But during the last fifteen years this problem has been the subject of studies based on thorough research which have advanced its solution, and even those with which Stubbs was able to make himself acquainted and which he has quoted sometimes in the notes to his later editions might have been turned to greater profit by him. The researches of Mr. Gross, the ingenious and disputable theories of Mr. Maitland, the discoveries of Mr. Round and Miss Mary Bateson, notably, deserve to be known by our readers. With their help we must now draw out a summary sketch, in which we shall make it our chief endeavour to give the history of the English towns its proper place in the framework of the general history of the towns of the west.

France in the Middle Ages was acquainted with infinitely varied forms of free or privileged towns, and very diverse too are the names which The "borough" were used to designate them from North to South. In England the degrees of urban enfranchise

1. For the bibliography, see Ch. Gross, Bibliography of British Municipal History, 1897. It is an excellent repertory. But since 1897, some very important works have appeared, notably those of Miss Mary Bateson. Some years ago, English municipal history was backward compared with that of France; but the activity now displayed in that respect by scholars on the other side of the Channel contrasts with the present scarcity of good monographs on the French towns.

2. Const. Hist., i, pp. 99–102, 438-462, and 667–676.