by Jack Lindsay
The wardship of heirs did not belong to the family, as generally in western-France; in Anglo-Norman custom it belonged to the feudal lord. In 1100 Henry I promised in his charter of liberties to accept the system of family wardship, but seigneurial wardship continued to be the rule. Indeed no other system would have worked after the separation of Normandy and England. Questions of uncertain or indirect succession thus played an important part in what has been called the tenurial crisis of the early twelfth century. The more distant and dubious the claim, the more crucial became the overlord’s consent and the more likely that he would take political aspects into his decision on the settlement. Also, he would be better placed for exacting a high cash return for his assent. The heir would need to pay a substantial finis terrae and offer a high price for the good will or arbitration of the king on his side. Titles to castles were even less secure than titles to land, and claims to property in offices varied greatly in strength, e.g. foresterships-in-fee showed hereditary office at its most precarious. The nobles were keen to hold local office by the time of Stephen; and here the issue of hereditary title would have been one of principle between crown and vassals. If that were so, with Henry II came a heavy setback for hereditary claims. ‘The sheriffs were investigated, many were removed, and the office ceased to be hereditary. Another local office to which heritable title had been claimed, the county justiciarship, was abolished. Title to local office became more precarious as title to land grew more secure. By 1215 it was beyond revival’ (Holt).
We see that these tenure problems, which were very much intensified by 1087, had their positive as well as their disturbing and upsetting effects. After the confusions of Stephen’s reign the hand of the crown was much strengthened. The inner conflict of Norman feudalism was deepened; certain aspects tended to disappear and there was an overall movement towards greater unification within the governing system, and towards more effective interaction of its parts. The Angevins seem to have grasped some of the difficulties which the Norman system had created for itself, and less drastic means were devised for dealing with rebellion; payment of ransom and demolition of castles tended to replace confiscation and disinheritance. Security of tenure and succession went together with the strengthening and elaboration of the royal system of law. The feudal contradictions were not eliminated, but they were lifted on to a new level.[374]
Perhaps it was also partly a sense of insecurity, a wish to make the most out of any given situation while it lasted, that had made lords enfeoff far more knights than they needed for service to over-lord or king. Abbot Turold of Peterborough ‘evilly gave lands to his relatives and to the knights who came with him’, says the Chronicle of Hugh Candidus. An archbishop of York explained that he had an over-large number of knights because his predecessors lad enfeoffed many more than they owed the king, not on account of the obligation of service that they owed, but because they wanted to provide for their kinsmen and those who served them’. A panegyrist says of an abbot of Ely that he enfeoffed knights only through compulsion, ‘not by intention or rather partiality for riches, not by exerting himself for relatives’. In a late case we see how men could grow confused about the service they owed. The bishop of Winchester owed the service of twenty knights and had seventy enfeoffed; one of them, Nigel of Broc, in 1201 put himself before the grand assize so that a jury could decide whether he owed the service of one knight for the fee held at Braishfield or whether his obligation was ‘to rise for the bishop in the king’s court and make room for him so that he can speak with the Lord King’. By 1135, of sixty-five lay honours that have been analysed, seventeen (which had five or more fees) were over-feoffed, forty were under-feoffed, eight were enfeoffed exactly to the extent of the quota. But by 1166, seven of the under-enfeoffed ones had a surplus. As for ecclesiastical honours with five or more fees, in 1135, eighteen were over-enfeoffed, three under-enfeoffed, one was exact. Some baronies were very heavily over-enfeoffed. After 1166 (Cartae Baronum) the crown seems to have tried to raise the quota on over-enfeoffed honours, at least for scutage purposes, to a figure corresponding to the actual situation, and the tenants-in-chief strongly objected.[375]
Some of the reasons stimulating lords to over-enfeoffing are given in the protests cited above. We may add that one value of sub-infeudation was that it spread the problems of management, supervision, and collecting of revenues. Throughout our period an educated administrative class was lacking. Hence the recourse to farming out responsibilities. Instead of having to organize things himself, the baron or his officer had only to deal with a single man and get in an agreed sum. As money transactions increased, the pressure to find ways of raising cash through the existing systems also increased. Sub-infeudation in general had a dual effect. On the one hand it provided a stable and definite framework, both social and economic. The majority of fees on the honours were created under William or Rufus; the resulting pattern in its main lines carried on for decades, even centuries; the royal quotas themselves remained relatively stable till the drastic reductions of the thirteenth century. On the other hand sub-infeudation had aspects that sapped the whole system. It was not a once-for-all process; it went on and on, complicating questions of loyalty and lessening the services demanded; above all by helping to replace personal services with commutation, it speeded up the increasing use of money in transactions originally controlled by feudal relationships.
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The effect of money in breaking down the institution of knighthood was of great importance; and we must therefore stress the distinction between the enfeoffed knight, bound essentially by feudal ties, and the mercenary knight, whose relationship with his master was primarily financial, even though feudal attitudes entered into it. When we hear of a ceremony of initiation, the subject is a member of the highest level of knights, the son of a king, an earl, or a great baron. The most elaborate account is perhaps that of the knighting of Geoffrey of Anjou by Henry I at Rouen in 1129. Occasionally we find a lesser person going through the ritual. Walter de la Haule was taken into custody for giving his sister to William de Bodiham and making him a knight ‘while he was not yet of age’. In 1220 Henry of Tracy claimed the manor of Barnstaple which ‘King John surrendered to him as his inheritance on making him a knight’. The lesser person was no doubt simply dubbed a knight by the baron giving him a fief.[376]
Mercenaries consisted roughly of household retainers, some of whom were hired on a permanent basis; of professional fighters hired individually or in bands for a specific purpose; and in Normandy also of armies of neighbouring regions such as Maine or Anjou, which in certain circumstances might be hired by Norman kings under command of their own rulers or lords. One of these lords might be the vassal of the king, but his aid normally needed subsidies. By the second half of the eleventh century mercenaries played an important role in warfare; by the later twelfth, and yet more in the thirteenth, they dominated, not only as the roving bands who were dreaded as reckless and ruthless looters, but as the paid soldiers of the armies. Even the enfeoffed knights had to be paid; wage-service came overwhelmingly to take the place of tenure service.
Only now and then household knights show up in the records. When Rufus in 1095 marched into Northumbria to put down Earl Robert, ‘he captured many prisoners in a fortress, including almost all the best men of the earl’s retinue’. A charter of 1094-1100 shows a lord making a grant to a continental church while at his house in England in presence of many knights of the familia (household). A knight from the familia of Hugh de Lacy founded a house of Augustinian canons in the wild Black Mountains about 1108.[377] In the early years of the Conquest king and barons liked to be surrounded with ready and trusty fighters; as they grew more secure, they often enfeoffed such men. The king had the biggest retinue of knights, but even the church lords needed them. Here we meet another clear link between the systems under the Confessor and those under William.[378]
The diversity of status and the miscellaneous nature of the functions of knights needs to be
stressed; we must not think of them as at all a homogeneous class. We find a considerable and striking variety of status if we approach the class from the military, tenurial, social, economic, or legal angles. Important sub-tenants of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds had ‘to ride in the saint’s service’, but their main duty was to find knights for him. In Domesday these knights appear after a list of bakers, ale-brewers, tailors, washerwomen, shoemakers, ropemakers, cooks, porters, agents ‘who daily all wait on the abbot and the brothers’. Also, ‘there are 14 reeves over the land, who have their houses in the said town, and under them 22 bordars’.[379] The magnates or superior knights gave the professionals as little land as they could. Alexander de Alno recalled in 1166, ‘My father gave his brother Hugh de Alno a small amount of land from his demesne so that if it became necessary he could do one knight’s service for the whole of my father’s land. And that grant was made to him and his heirs in king William’s time.’ (Note the claim to hereditary right.) From Domesday we learn that a knight normally held about one and a half hides, just a trifle more than most well-off peasants. Very few had more than three and a half hides. So the feudal middle-men did very well out of the arrangements.[380] Probably one to two hides would just have supported a knight in the eleventh century: he needed weapons, one or two horses, and the means to maintain them. Besides war-service such a knight did lesser duties such as aid and escort of his lord. Thus, Gilbert count of Brionne often sent Herluin, founder of Bec, on missions to other courts, and when Herluin refused to take Duke Robert a message that he considered morally wrong, he lost his fief. As at Ely, household knights would get food from the cellarer as well as being paid; the Ely abbot supplied many of his men with arms.[381]
The rise of the paid soldier could not have come about without a wide economic expansion, the growth of towns and trade, and the money economy that tended to break down economic localism. In earlier times, when money was short, services could be substantially paid for by grants of land, the lord retaining various rights to exploit it and its tillers; but this method of payment, once it involved hereditary rights, was based on a commodity steadily becoming less available, though events like the vast dispossessions after 1066 could give it a new life. The more that money was used and needed to sustain a rising standard of living for the lords, lay or ecclesiastic, the more the fief-system must disintegrate. Instead of the fyrd or arrière-ban of the feudal host, the king could use soldiers who were at his disposal as long as he was able to pay them. Through the relative wealth of England in the first half of the eleventh century, paid soldiers had come to the fore, producing an élite force.[382]
The stipendiarii, the men hired for a particular campaign, had their English parallel in the lithsmen, butsecarls, and related groups in the pay of kings. These men were trained in Viking tradition to fight on foot and to man ships; the post-1066 stipendiarii fought as heavy or light cavalry, as archers or ordinary footmen. The kings taxed the people heavily through Danegeld, and used scutage and many other dues to pay the men, who were also called solidarii, men who served for a shilling. (The term milites stipendarii is first found in a Pipe Roll of 1162. The men were then paid 8d a day; under John the general rate had risen to 2s. These were high rates for the time. Our word for soldier is from solidarius, server-for-pay. The noun sold, common down to the sixteenth century, meant pay; solidus was Latin for shilling. A shilling per day was the normal pay for a knight at the end of the twelfth century.) Apart from their place in retinues, knights came to be officers in command of a considerable body of men-at-arms, who were mounted or foot sergeants and who got 4d or 6d a day if on horse, 2d or 3d if on foot.[383]
Rufus preferred mercenaries and seems to have used up much of his inheritance treasure on them; his fame for generosity brought him soldiers from all over Europe. To meet the wages he used the heavy taxes administered by Flambard and plundered church monies. Henry I was more careful, but he too used many mercenaries, especially Bretons. In his later wars he was almost wholly dependent on them. Apart from the problems of long campaigns, he trusted mercenaries far more than men who had sworn him feudal loyalty. When Robert of Bellême revolted in 1102, he put his stronghold of Bridgenorth under three captains with eighty mercenary knights. Henry I threatened to hang all prisoners if the castle did not surrender in three days; the captains and the burghers of the surrounding town agreed, but the hired knights refused. The burghers shut the knights in part of the castle and opened the gates. Henry ordered that the knights should go free with their equipment as men who had kept faith with their lord; and as they went out, they loudly complained of the way they had been deceived by captains and burghers. Orderic says that they did so in order that their withdrawal should not discredit other mercenaries. We can see what a high degree of solidarity was felt by such men and how much they valued their reputation for loyalty.[384]
In the letter that Henry wrote to Anselm after Tinchebrai he referred to his battle ‘on a named and fixed day’ with Robert and ‘all the forces of knights and infantry which by begging or buying he was able to collect’. The close connection between his forces and his fiscal system is brought out by the fact that in 1123-4, when his knights ‘complained of the coins they got in wages’, he ordered the mutilation of all English moneyers who had debased the system.[385] Thus, by the late twelfth century mercenaries were ousting the knight of military tenure; obligations of host service and castle guard were mostly commuted for money payments; the money fief was playing an increasingly significant role in recruitment; most of the men serving in Angevin armies were paid regular wages. By the time of Magna Carta the Anglo-Norman type of feudalism was in rapid decline; the feudal levy had ceased to act as an effective fighting force, and there is no sign of it having been summoned in this period.[386]
The way in which the motive of the mercenary as the typical character in twelfth century society was coming up in men’s minds is shown by Orderic’s description of monks who gained promotion by currying favour with lay authorities as stipendiarii non monachi; and Lawrence of Durham remarks in the preface to a poem that the poet too needs incentives, and cites the farmer driven on by hopes of harvest, the pedlar by hopes of gain, the soldier by thoughts of pay.
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Another example of the increasing efforts to extract profit, preferably in cash form, from the system of feudal relations is to be found in the extension of ‘incidents’. These, we saw, had a pre-1066 history, but it was at this time that they were systematically worked out. A man on taking up a fief paid a relief to his lord; when he died, his heir made homage and paid a relief, if of legal age. The lord took guardianship of an heir under age and arranged the marriages of heiresses. The tenant made aids of free gifts on various occasions: after the lord’s eldest son was knighted or one of his daughters married, or if he himself had to be ransomed. Henry I in his coronation charter promised to make the succession relief just and lawful. What did that mean? The compilation Leis Willelme (probably 1095-1135) linked the relief with the English heriot, and expatiated on Cnut’s law of heriots, which deals with horses, arms and armour. But it adds that if the vassal lacks the horse and arms his father had, he may acquit himself by paying 100s; for a man holding his land by a yearly rent the relief is to be a year’s rent. A baron, however, had a chance to bargain. The Dialogue of the Exchequer says, ‘He is not to satisfy the king according to a settled sum, but as he may be able to arrange with the king.’ A relief was often £200, even for an estate of fifteen fees or a mere three. The general understanding was that a baron’s relief should be reasonable; Magna Carta laid down that the relief for a whole barony should be £100.[387]
The rights of wardship and marriage were the most irksome. The lord got all an estate’s profits during an heir’s minority. Boys were minors till twenty-one, girls till the nubile age of fourteen. The lord also controlled the marriages of wards, male or female, and of all widows. A villein paid a merchet of a few shillings for leave for his girl to wed — merchet being regarded as
the supreme test of servile status. Yet when a baron’s widow paid a hundred or a thousand pounds for leave to remarry, the payment was taken as mark of her high rank. Henry I promised reforms, but his concessions were ignored. Widows and orphans were still sold for large sums. What the ladies feared was not so much the hole made in their estates as the disparagement — to be forced to marry below their rank, perhaps by being given by the king to some official who had risen from a lower status. They at times paid large sums to remain free; disobedience to the king’s commands involved severe punishment. At times the bidding for a ward was brisk. The itinerant justices collected information so that the king could charge as large a sum as possible and also be sure the estates in question were farmed as profitably as possible. They inquired, for example, as to the age of a widow, the number of her children and the value of her dowry. (We find shameless neglect, profiteering and theft on the part of the crown agents farming estates in wardship.) By the late twelfth century payments were often taken in small instalments, with much inefficiency or carelessness on the part of the officials. To offset this, often very precise details as to payment were laid down.[388]
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Scutage, the payment made in place of a knightly military service, became more and more common, and it gives us information as to the current value of a knight. In the twelfth century we find it levied sometimes in the early years at 13s 4d, sometimes at £1, only once at more than that amount.[389] A serving knight around 1086 had an income of 32s to £2, which enabled him to keep going, but not to rise in the world. Domesday has hardly any cases of a knight holding a whole manor (the unit of tenure). Where once or twice there is an exception, the knight stands third, not second, in the tenurial scale. Generally he holds a small unit (akin to an important manorial appurtenance, for example ‘There, four slaves, a church and three knights’) or something like the berewick, an outlying piece of land within the manor’s system but geographically distinct.[390] Some knights held bits of demesne manors; such knights come up in the questions put to tenants-in-chief in 1166, as again in the Assize of Arms of 1181. These men seem to be in and about the tenant-in-chief’s household.