king's council, showed, from an early date, the liveliest repugnance to service in the field, which, as the possessions of the Crown most exposed to attack were those which lay in France, implied almost always absence from England and a campaign beyond sea in some distant part of the Continent. The knights soon showed themselves intent on escaping this obligation, and when Henry II. offered to exempt them from it on payment of a tax, they accepted his offer with eagerness. This was the tax known as "scutagium" (scutage), and on payment of it the knights were permitted to remain at home. This method of commutation, however, left untouched the other burdens of military tenure, notably the oppressive and outrageous rights of marriage and wardship which existed in their most rigorous form only in England and Normandy. Attempts were consequently made to avoid knighthood itself, the cause or occasion of so much hardship, and the formal act of admission to the order was purposely omitted or evaded. Ordinances insisting on the acceptance of the honour occur perpetually during the thirteenth century, a clear proof that it was submitted to with ill grace. The revival of the spirit of chivalry in the reign of Edward III. was merely an accident, a passing fashion. As early as 1278, we find the king ordering the sheriffs to impose knighthood, not only upon persons belonging to the knightly class, but upon every one whose income from real estate amounted to twenty pounds sterling, from whatever lord, and by whatever title, he might hold his lands. This direction was, afterwards, frequently reHallam, Mid. Ages, i. 179.

peated, and it shows how far by process of time and stress of circumstances the two classes had mingled with each other, the richest of the free proprietors being promoted to the rank of knights, and knights who had suffered the partition of their estates sinking into mere landowners.1 It is remarkable that in less than a century the principle of primogeniture already applied to the military tenures became the customary rule of the ordinary, the so-called "socage" tenures, Kent and a few other districts alone forming an exception. This shows plainly that the distinction between the tenures corresponded to no equally marked distinctions between the persons who held by them. It was to a great extent the same class which held land by these two titles, and to that class applied in both cases the same rules of succession. In short, from the thirteenth century the great majority of the knights seem to have acquired the tastes and habits of mere rural landowners.2 The military organization prevailing at the end of the fourteenth century marked the end of this process of evolution. The gratuitous and compulsory military service charged upon knights' fees had disappeared, and the tax which had been substituted for it was no longer collected. The nucleus of the king's army, at any rate upon foreign service, was composed of restless

1 Stubbs, iii. 545.

2 As early as 1074, in the species of manifesto against King William I. put forth by the Norman barons, they speak with envy of the English, who are suffered to till their land in peace, and drink and feast, while their conquerors are compelled to serve upon the Continent. Stubbs, i. 291. Nolens vexare agrarios milites. (Charter of Henry II.) 3 Stubbs, iii. 540.

and warlike barons, who gathered around them men of like disposition with themselves and who sold to the king for hard cash the aid of their regiments of adventurers. Most of the original knights kept more and more aloof from these bands of condottieri. Many did not even bear the title of knights at all; they were esquires, gentlemen, "competent to become knights," in the words of an ordinance of 1446, which directed the candidates for the shrievalty to be chosen from among them, in default evidently of men who had actually received knighthood. At the same time they bore arms, but they did so in common with other classes of the nation for the preservation of order in the counties. An ordinance enjoins that every freeman is to arm himself according to his means, some with mail coat, buckler, and lance, others with the simple doublet of mail. They formed a sort of home force 2-a species of local militia which no longer rested on the old feudal basis, its duties being those of a civil police. It was especially its persistently warlike spirit and its attachment to the career of arms which, down to 1789, kept the French noblesse as a class apart from the rest of the nation. In England the military spirit had vanished except in the case of a few turbulent barons who were destined to destroy each other and to disappear from the scene before the beginning of the

1 Stubbs, iii. 547.

2 By the terms of the Statute, 25 Edward III., ch. 8, it is made illegal to lead the militia out of its own county, unless in case of urgent necessity certified by Parliament, or to lead it out of the kingdom under any circumstances whatever. Gneist, i. 289.

sixteenth century. It might be said that, from the end of the fifteenth century, the bulk of the old English knighthood was nothing more than an upper rural class, to which belonged upon an equal footing with each other all the more important free landowners. Le Pogge1 describes them at the period of which we are now speaking as given to agriculture, selling wool and the produce of their herds, thinking it no disgrace to grow rich by such means, and acknowledging wealth as the test of nobility. We see how very near the truth it would be to affirm that the feudal system in the strictest sense of the term has never existed in England. In the first place no opportunity occurred for the creation of great provincial "satrapies." Of the two other political elements of feudalism, the first-the baronial jurisdiction—was narrowed in its development, feeble, and short-lived; it only very rarely went beyond the limits of a manorial court, and it never attained the competency or dignity of a high tribunal; 2 at an early date it yielded to and was swept away by the king's courts, and the fourteenth century, so to speak, knew it no more. The remaining element-the military fief—was, in the same century which witnessed its creation, exempted from the obligation of military service: this exemption was granted in consideration of a special money payment which before long lost its name. and disappeared in the general mass of civil taxation. According to Coke, scutage was not levied after the eighth year of Edward II. The remainder of the

2

1 Le Pogge, De Nobilitate. Stubbs, i. 399. 3 Stubbs, ii. 522.

E.C.

E

burdens, those which were purely fiscal, charged upon the military tenures, were already looked upon as obsolete in the time of James I. In the reign of Charles II. they were finally put an end to by means of a money commutation, and all tenures, without exception, were reduced to the type of ordinary free proprietorship, known as "socage." After 1660, military feudal estates no longer existed in England.

The civil elements of the feudal land system were equally quick to emerge and take a modern shape. The end of the fourteenth century witnessed the commencement and rapid growth of the practice of letting land to farm, which became general at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and which was, from the very outset, a form of tenure absolutely free from all feudal characteristics: it depended on purely economic relations, and by the terms of its instruments freedom of contract was recognized as the basis of agreement.1 Certain extreme rights which have been reserved to landlords do not in any sense belong to the middle ages: the most stringent of them are a late invention of the landed aristocracy, and date from the eighteenth century. Copyhold tenure is frequently referred to as an evidence of deeply-seated and persistent feudal sentiment. Those who so refer to it have been misled by appearances. Copyholds were, according to the theory lately current, grants of land of a revocable nature made by the lord to his serfs, and burdened with a great variety of charges which exhibit types of nearly all the feudal obligations known to French law. These grants were held before long to 1 Pollock, Land Laws, 139.