become not less characteristic of the social system than were the unity of the kingdom and the solid establishment of the State.1

1 We know that in 1789 the proposal to create a chamber of high dignitaries met with the most strenuous resistance from the whole body of the French nobility, and above all from the country gentlemen. They instinctively felt that this selection of a political aristocracy would be followed, so far as they themselves were concerned, by loss of caste and a sinking to the level of the commonalty. Later, in 1814, M. de Villèle expressed the same sentiment when, criticizing the establishment of a house of hereditary peers, he asked how France could furnish two hundred individuals so superior to the rest as to merit this high distinction. It would amount, he added, to a suppression of the remainder of the nobility in favour of the two hundred chosen families. That which he dreaded as a calamity is exactly what has been taking place, since the middle ages, on the other side of the Channel, and has laid the foundation of civil and political liberty in England.

III

THE KNIGHTS AND THE BURGESSES

THE DECAY OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM

We have next to consider the position and progress in the counties of the inferior tenants-in-chief of the Crown. The first steps in the process of their development which strike our notice are purely feudal in character. Knights' fees, unknown at the period immediately following the conquest, were rapidly created, and by 1100 they existed in great numbers.1 They were definite estates, to which the obligation of military service was specially attached, instead of being charged, generally, on the lands belonging to the manor. Hence, as happened also on the Continent, arose a well-marked distinction between two species of estates, one noble and the other inferior; the first held by military service, and subject, not only to strict rules of primogeniture, but also to the oppressive rights of aid, wardship and marriage; 2 the second held in "free socage"-this is the legal term--and exempt from the more onerous feudal obligations. Military tenure Stubbs, i. 283.

2 Hallam, Mid. Ages, i. 179.

brought about a first process of fusion between the tenants-in-chief of the Crown, and the tenants of barons or sub-tenants, the terms of the holdings being the same in both cases; on the other hand, it seemed calculated altogether to separate them both from the general body of landed proprietors, and to make of the knights a class by themselves, a species of equestrian order, at once overbearing and exclusive.

Other causes more powerful than the feudal spirit averted the danger. In the first place, England in the twelfth century was among the European countries, which possessed the greatest proportion of free men, that is, of free landowners-the two things being then identical-by the side of, and in addition to, the feudal knighthood. They consisted either of Normans of inferior rank who had come over with or rejoined their lords, or of original Saxon proprietors-there were many of these existing before the conquest, especially in the Eastern counties-who, restored to favour after a time with the new masters of the soil, had recovered their freedom and part of their estates. Various documents of the twelfth century show us these Saxons living upon the best terms with the Norman freemen and barons, allied to them by marriage, and very soon themselves aspiring to baronial rank. The non-noble free landowners in England possessed as a class the numbers, unity, and stability which they lacked in France. The fact that their class originally supplied the principle of the classification of persons is only one proof of its importance. Bracton, writing in the thirteenth century, 1 Gneist, i. 291. 2 Dialogus de Scaccario, Stubbs' Select Charters.

distinguishes only two personal conditions-liberty and villeinage: other distinctions are to him merely subdivisions of no legal importance. The French jurist, Beaumanoir,1 writing almost contemporaneously, divides the people into three classes: nobles, freemen, and serfs. In France, the class of freemen practically consited of the burghers. It was with difficulty that the freemen who inhabited the rural districts avoided the forfeiture of their freedom: they only escaped by migrating to the towns.

To sum up the non-noble free proprietors in England formed a powerful body well suited to attract to themselves the class immediately above-namely, that of the knights, and to absorb it or be absorbed by it if circumstances should diminish the distance between them. The junction of the two was not long in taking place; the knights' fees, which were originally of considerable extent, began from the twelfth century to suffer frequent subdivision; these partitions were effected chiefly in order to provide portions for daughters and younger sons, and the practice became so common that the legislature was compelled to interfere. The great charter (the version of 1217) prohibits the alienation of fees being carried to such an extent as to render what remained insufficient to bear the prescribed military burdens. This was another symptom of the growth of the division of property. In 1290,2 the legislature abolished subinfeudations, and at the same time sanctioned the right, in the case of every man who

2

1 Hallam, Constitutional History, i. 197.

By the stat. "Quia Emptores," 18 Ed. I. c. i.

was not an immediate vassal of the king, to sell, even without the consent of his lord, the whole or part of his estate.1 In either case the new owner became the vassal of the lord whose vassal the grantor had been. These measures helped to multiply the lesser tenantsin-chief of the Crown; on the other hand, as the domains of the knights changed hands and diminished in importance, the social condition of their holders became more like that of the ordinary free landowners, who, lately their inferiors, had come to be their equals in wealth. Neither class had actually sunk, for during the same period wealth in general, and consequently the profit drawn from landed estates, had substantially increased, so that the income derived from the half or a third part of a given property was probably equal in amount to its entire revenue at a former date. Both classes however were undergoing a levelling process which extended even to certain of the barons whose fiefs had been cut up by grants of dowries or other donations. The diminution in the number of baronies after the reign of Henry III. is a well-known fact.2

We find also that in other respects during the same period the modes of life and habits of the two classes no longer differed from each other. The knights, for the same reasons which made them slow to attend the

1 In 1327 the right of alienation was extended even to the immediate vassals of the king. Stubbs, ii. 370.

2 Matt. Paris, v. 617. Of ninety-eight baronies whose representatives had been summoned in 1300, fourteen were extinct at the accession of Henry IV., and thirty-three had lost the importance and dignity of hereditary peerages. Stubbs, iji. 16, 17.