by Jack Lindsay
Many Domesday knights hold villein land. Once the professional knights, both French and English, are called milites probati, proven knights, and we find peasants ‘dwelling under them’. So they seem more tied to the soil than others who merely get rents. In early years the small land fief might be linked with a rent payment, as knights could not be expected to attend much to agriculture; and this sort of assigned grant may be termed a type of money fief.[391] The knight with revenues from villein-holdings (perhaps merely the non-homefarm sector) was getting rent charges and was moving just slightly away from complete dependence. Knights had to be ready for service ‘beyond or within the kingdom, wherever and whenever the abbot wants to have his own knight’ (a Bury charter of enfeoffment). It has been argued that elsewhere, but not in England, the fief-rente was much used for ensuring a supply of castle guard, a duty much suited for lesser knights. However, Domesday shows knights gathered in the largest numbers in Sussex, Kent and Herefordshire, counties of strategic importance.[392]
Equipment must have been a worrying matter for the small knight. Under Stephen the knight tended to have a low status and was often linked with crossbowmen. Common rustic knights fought beside mercenaries or hired knights; and the upper knights were distinguished as ‘belted military men’, paired with bishops, ‘finely equipt’, or ‘highly equipt’. Yet, about 1150, the knight’s equipment was simple compared with what it was a century later. A writer of the 1210s speaking of the 1150s, remarked, ‘The world was not then so proud as in our days. A king’s son would ride with his cape bundled up, without any more equipage; now there is hardly a squire who doesn’t want a baggage-horse.’[393]
The early years of Henry II’s reign saw a crucial change in knightly status, making the cleavage between the higher and the lower levels more acute. Late twelfth century feodaries say, ‘Five hides make the knight’s fee.’ The century had seen an extension of cultivation, plus an increase in hereditary tenures, which weakened the lord’s juridical control.[394] Knights with nothing but rent from a small piece of land suffered badly. Military service ceased to be their prime function and became an imposed burden. Not that there was any lessening of the need for fighters. The wars about the inheritance in Anjou and Aquitaine demanded more men than ever, and also more equipment and supplies; transport costs were high and campaigns were long. The small knight was incapable of fighting in such wars. Indeed many of them were by now liable only for a fraction of their former services. A fragmentation of twelfth-century tenures had gone on, which has been explained as being the result of a lack of male heirs and of devolution upon heiresses, and the effect of sales, farmings-out and family commitments, but which was generally produced by the whole trend of feudalism we have been tracing. The small knight’s economic basis was insufficient to keep him equipped and active in a world of rising prices and increasingly expensive weapons. The vavasour knight insisted that his land, even if it stayed undivided, was inadequate for the provision of a full knight.
Fractional fees existed quite early, perhaps deliberately introduced; thus at Canterbury in 1090 and at Rochester several knights got together to provide one ready for service. The knight seems to be feeling already a pull between his role as soldier and that as landholder anxious to hold his own in the developing agricultural situation. Pressure for fragmentation may have come from below. Also, at the lowest levels of organization, the effects of Anglo-Saxon practices persisted. On some ecclesiastical estates (Ramsey, Malmesbury), responsibility for military service may not have been complicated and ‘distorted through so many stages of personal and tenurial ties usually consequent on the Conquest and redistribution from above’ (Harvey).[395] In the twelfth century, in the records of the upper and middle sections of society, we seldom meet tenants with an integral knight’s fee; we find even a ‘fifth part of the third part of a fee of one knight’. Large fractions of fees (half, third, quarter) might have been worked out by holders who were all on a single well organised estate; but with small, broken-up and scattered sites, the reckoning could have been only in terms of money. At a date that must be in Henry I’s reign, a man and his heirs were to hold land in Warwickshire ‘by a third part of the service by the yearly payment of 20s’.[396] By 1100 we saw Henry I was driven to lend aid to the small knight. The Dialogue of the Exchequer (by the late 1170s) deals at length with the knight in debt:
[The belted knight] When the other chattels are sold, a horse will be left to him, and it must be a trained horse, lest he who is entitled by his rank to ride, should be compelled to go on foot.
[The active knight] The whole of his personal armour, along with the horses necessary shall be exempt from distraint so that when need arises he can be employed on business for the king and realm, fully equipt with arms and horses...always supposing he is to serve not at his own cost but the crown’s.
[Royal intervention] If the tenant-in-chief, who is responsible to the king, fails to pay scutage, not only his chattels but those of his knights and villeins are indiscriminately sold. For the principle on which scutage is raised mainly affects the knights, since it is only due to the king from knights and by reason of their service. Yet I myself, though not yet hoary-headed, have seen not only the lord’s chattels lawfully sold for his personal debts, but also those of his knights and villeins. But the king’s ordinance has restricted this practice to scutage alone...that if the knights have paid to their lord the scutage due from their fees, and can produce pledges to prove it, the law forbids the sale of their chattels for the lord’s debts.[397]
We see here one of the results of the knights’ tenure consisting of villeinland. By 1181 the Assize of Arms was worried at the amount of armour come into the hands of Jews. Scutage and a recognition of the knights’ plight tended to disrupt the whole balance of lord and vassal in their interlinked obligations, on which feudal society depended. Near the end of the twelfth century an alternative method was devised, by which the tenant-in-chief could pay a fine, a sum fixed arbitrarily by the king, which relieved him of his entire burden of military service; its acceptance by the king authorized him to go on collecting scutage at the current rate from his sub-tenants. As usual magnates tried to use the situation to gain as much as possible for themselves, getting the money from tenants for both scutage and fine. They made a good profit especially if they were over-enfeoffed with knights, for then they collected scutage from them all. Thus, at Bury St Edmunds the abbey had fifty-two knights but owed service for only forty; so, as Jocelin of Brakelond explains: ‘so often as 20s are charged upon the fee, there will remain £12 to the abbot; if more or less is assessed, more or less will remain as a balance to him’. If a baron could recover his fine from tenants, he was in the pleasant position of being relieved at no cost to himself from many onerous duties. We find the fines on the rolls described as for ‘not crossing in the army of Normandy’ or for ‘having peace when he does not cross’, or for ‘leave to stay in England’; later they are merely said to be instead of his ‘passage’. Later we hear of fines pro servitio, and the principle is then applied to service in Wales and Scotland. But whether or not the barons found the fines acceptable, the fines were primarily a device of the king to raise revenue.[398] The royal officials did not fail to note that profits were made from scutage on over-enefoffed estates. Henry I kept a close watch on such honours and asked for extra scutage: a policy carried on by Stephen and reasserted by Henry II with only partial success. As for the way in which tenants-in-chief passed scutage down to mesne-tenants, who passed it on at times to rear-vassals and even to peasants, there was much argument as to who should get the profit from surplus fees.
Scutage, payment in place of military service, was then closely linked with the existence of knights’ fees, though in a broad sense it had a long history, going back to late Roman days. We must not identify it with fines for failure to carry out war duties such as the English fyrdwite. True commutation appeared with the expansion of a monetary economy. It is found in Germany and France in th
e eleventh century, in France particularly linked with the wish of the people of the communes to avoid war service; it was prominent in Normandy by 1172. It was fundamental to French feudalism by the thirteenth century; in England, relatively prosperous, it appeared earlier. Under the Confessor men were already paying wardpenny to escape commonward duty; towns could at times commute war-service by paying the crown for replacement at the rate of 20s a soldier; and castle work and even castle guard were at times commuted under Rufus and Henry I. Domesday states that several towns owing fyrd duty according to the five hide system of recruitment compounded their service at times for a fixed payment. However, in the late English period, Danegeld was the main military impost, looked on as a tax to be used chiefly for paying mercenaries. A Danegeld (usually 2s a hide) was imposed by the Normans until Stephen’s reign, and briefly tried by Henry II; but by then it lacked its primarily military aspect and was assessed by hides and carucates rather than by knights’ fees or by revenues or chattels. After 1162 the term went out, though it carried on in effect in hidages and carucates of the Angevin kings. Under the Normans many methods were used for meeting the costs of war. The Dialogue says that in the early period the wages of mercenaries were met by the profits from royal justice, payments for privileges, revenues from town communities; and it implies that when Henry I commuted food rents from his demesne, there too was a source of military funds.[399]
By 1100, when Henry I granted exemptions including scutage to the monastery of Lewes, his casual tone indicates that the tax was already well known. After that references to it multiply; and as we saw, the services due from many fragmented knights’ fees must have been commuted for money. Scutage is mainly mentioned in church records, as ecclesiastics were particularly interested in bypassing war services and they kept many more records concerning property than did laymen. But it was as important for laymen, and by the early twelfth century, or even earlier, it was effectively displacing knight service as the basic war obligation of Norman feudalism.[400] Yet, although knight service almost disappeared, the idea of it was so deeply imbedded in feudal society that the obligation survived formally until the reign of Charles II.
The twelfth century saw a fluctuation of the wages of knights, scutage rates, and the length of war service. The interconnections are hard to show with any precision, but clearly a general crisis of feudal tenures underlay the various developments. Later scutage assessments in France can at times be related to replacement costs. Philip II had a schedule of commutation rates for barons, bannerets, knights, and squires or sergeants. Signs of a similar system can be found in thirteenth century Normandy. In England during the century after 1066 it seems that scutage rates were usually linked with the daily wages of knights multiplied by the customary length of service. But while scutage had the advantage of supplying more revenue to meet war costs, it had its disadvantage in the lack of any clear equation between the services lost and the services for which scutage money had become available. The Angevins could not recover the full cost of replacement; Richard and John tried hard to get their vassals to attend them in person on overseas expeditions. (After 1204, with Normandy lost, English barons no longer owed continental service for Norman estates.) No doubt it was the crown’s difficulties in such matters that had led to the creation in the later twelfth century of the fine on barons, which we have discussed. By the late thirteenth century scutage had lost its original meaning and was just one more way of raising revenue. Tenure for military service had been thoroughly undermined.[401]
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But we cannot understand this development by considering it only in relation to war revenues. The rising price of equipment, for instance, was linked with the whole rise in prices in the twelfth century.[402] Between 1050 and 1150 rents and prices seem to have more or less doubled. Then, after a while, they went up still faster. The wages of knights had to rise as well. Early evidence shows the knight getting 4d a day; in 1173 payment to castle guard rose from 8d to is a day; under John 2s a day had to be paid to a knight, and later 3s or 4s.[403]
A glance at agricultural prices will give us some idea of what was happening. Between 1172 and 1176 came a sharp rise in the price of cereals; the years 1178-1204 saw a slower but still steady increase, affecting the cost of provisioning households. For livestock the years 1163-83 seem fairly stable, with an ox costing 3s, sheep 4d, a cow or a bull at times 2s 8d, or even 2s, but usually 3s, and a sow or a boar bringing in 1s, though at times only 8d. With the 1180s came a rise to 4s or 5s for plough beasts, with sheep at 6d each. In 1196 the itiner-ant justices were told in September to see to the stocking of royal manors at set prices:
The price of an ox shall be 4s, and of a cow the same, and of a farm horse the same, and of a fine-wooled sheep 10d, and of a coarse-wooled sheep 6d, and of a sow 12d and of a boar 12d.[404]
The restocking of 107 manors is recorded. Except for cows bought at Black Boughton for 3s, the prices paid were those laid down. Only at Sulby (Northamptonshire) were sheep with fine wool introduced. But the prices were actually set high. On a group of fifteen estates, mainly in the south-west, 3s was the rate for horses, oxen, cows and bulls; and this seems to have been the current rate for most of the country.[405] The agricultural situation was putting up the price of traction animals, including horses. By the second decade of the thirteenth century the cost of grain had doubled, and the price of livestock since 1180 had doubled or more. (Needless to say, in a medieval economy there must have been many minor variations in prices in different parts of the country; statistics are limited. But the figures cited above may be taken as showing the general pattern of price movement.)
In such a situation equipment inevitably kept on getting more costly and complicated; the common or rustic knight, gregarius or rusticus, found it ever harder to maintain his social position. The last decade of Henry II’s reign saw the armour for man and his mount growing stronger and more elaborate; the knight needed a complete mailcoat and a heavier helmet. Later in the thirteenth century came plate armour.[406] The knight kept needing a stronger horse. A Domesday horse cost £1; a century later the heavier horse must have cost at least five times that sum; another century and it cost from £40 to £80. These prices included a certain amount of inflation, but behind them was great economic expansion, reflected in the advance of town life, crafts and trade, and in changing agricultural methods.[407] Here it will be sufficient to cite the growth of population as an example of what was happening. The growth had been going on ever since the eighth century, it seems; but the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the maturing and converging of a number of factors that allowed the trends of the previous period to gather a new momentum. England in 1086 is estimated roughly to have had 1,100,000 people; by 1348 the number had risen to some 3,757,500; by 1377 it fell back to some 2,224,000, and by 1438 to 2,100,000. Servile status held back population. Of two villages dependent on the Benedictine priory of Spalding (Lincolnshire) in the thirteenth century, one was mostly made up of free peasants able to divide or bequeath property at will, and they married early and increased in numbers, while the other, with folk of servile status, who were unable to divide the land, saw late marriages and a dwindling population.
A break up of the demesne was going on in England and on the continent in the twelfth century. The evidence comes mainly from ecclesiastical estates: their surveys show such land as being leased out, with tenants exerting pressure to free themselves from labour services in favour of money rent. The one surviving Pipe Roll of Henry I’s reign reveals how increasingly important money had become in the administration; we find country farms rendered in money and not in kind, and so on. Not that we can ignore the demand for money and its effects even in earlier years: military tenures themselves had from the outset aimed at getting in a certain amount of money, from the tenant-in-chief down to the rustic knight. And the money bond and the feudal bond were liable to merge; the mercenaries at Bridgenorth in 1102 saw Robert of Bellême as princeps as well as paymaster. But gener
ally cash transactions tended to dissolve what we have called fief feudalism, the tenures with military service.
As demesne land was reduced or leased out, less labour services were needed, so the tenants had a favourable situation for changing the form of their obligations. Not that a large amount of labour rent was not still being called for; and the customary tenants or villeins owing the services were not called servile. Rather they were distinguished from the few servi or ancillae who were cited. And they were not yet usually burdened with dues such as merchet, heriot, toll, or arbitrary tallage, whereas on the continent such dues were being asked of free as well as servile dependents. The tenants were helped in their demands for money rents by the wish of the lords for easily realized revenues, and also by the vulnerability of the ecclesiastics. A change came under the Angevins, however, a sort of counter-attack by estate lords, who sought to tie customary or villein tenants down to hereditary labour services: and the courts, concerned only about the rights of free tenants, were ready to leave customary tenants to the jurisdiction of the manor courts. The lords, seeking ready cash, did their best to exploit their private courts fiscally. In such a situation the knights had to rise higher in the social scale or rapidly sink.[408]
The better-off knight was changing from a warrior to a man of social importance in his locality, concerned with assize work and tax assessment. The change matured by mid-twelfth century, but rising prices faced these gentry knights with the same problems as the small professional knights; many fell into debt. (Distraint of knighthood seems to go back to John.) The crown tried to keep up their numbers by stipulating in 1181 that laymen with land or chattels to the value of sixteen marks should hold the equipment of a knight, and that those with ten marks should own a hauberk. But many men with military tenures had turned wholeheartedly to developing their land and taking advantage of an expanding market; so the Assize produced complaints that ‘unskilled rustics, accustomed to furrows and ditches’, were being against their will ‘vaunted with knightly arms’.[409] The gentry knights who survived became occupied with the administration; they bore the main weight of judicial matters. They became more and more involved with the Grand Assize, which was extending its amount of business in often long and tedious procedures with continual postponements of cases. Four knights as a committee elected twelve others to serve on the jury; as their numbers dwindled, the same men had to keep on serving. They were at times even called on for juries at the petty assizes where ordinary freemen were competent to serve. And they had many side duties. If a litigant pleaded confinement to bed through sickness, four knights visited him and testified as to his condition. They inspected lands in dispute, perambulated bounds, made assignment of dower and marriage portions, made land valuations in a settlement by a final concord, or audited accounts of an estate in wardship. Transfers of cases could take up much time and be expensive.