The History of England | Page 8

it to the tenants-in-chief.
When the tenant died his land reverted to the lord, who only granted it
to the heir after the payment of a year's revenue, and on condition of
the same service being rendered. If the heir were a minor, and thus

incapable of rendering military service, the land was retained by the
lord until the heir came of age; heiresses could only marry with the
lord's leave some one who could perform his services. The tenant had
further to attend the lord's court--whether the lord was his king or
not--submit to his jurisdiction, and pay aids to the lord whenever he
was captured and needed ransom, when his eldest son was made a
knight, and when his eldest daughter married.
Other land was held by churchmen on condition of praying or singing
for the soul of the lord, and the importance of this tenure was that it
was subject to the church courts and not to those of the king. Some was
held in what was called free socage, the terms of which varied; but its
distinguishing feature seems to have been that the service, which was
not military, was fixed, and that when it was performed the lord had no
further hold on the tenant. The great mass of the population were,
however, villeins, who were always at the beck and call of their lords,
and had to do as much ploughing, sowing, and reaping of his land as he
could make them. Theoretically they were his goods and chattels, who
could obtain no redress against any one except in the lord's court, and
none at all against him. They could not leave their land, nor marry, nor
enter the church, nor go to school without his leave. All these forms of
tenure and kinds of service, however, shaded off into one another, so
that it is impossible to draw hard and fast lines between them. Any one,
moreover, might hold different lands on different terms of service, so
that there was little of caste in the English system; it was upon the land
and not the person that the service was imposed; and William's
Domesday Book was not a record of the ranks and classes of the people,
but a survey of the land, detailing the rents and service due from every
part.
The local agency by which the Normans enforced these arrangements
was the manor. The Anglo-Saxons had organized shires and hundreds,
but the lowest unit, township or vill seems to have had no organization
except, perhaps, for agricultural purposes. The Danegeld, which
William imposed after the Domesday survey, was assessed on the
hundreds, as though there were no smaller units from which it could be
levied. But the hundred was found too cumbrous for the efficient

control of local details; it was divided into manors, the Normans using
for this purpose the germs of dependent townships which had long been
growing up in England; and the agricultural organization of the
township was dovetailed into the jurisdictional organization of the
manor. The lord became the lord of all the land on the manor, the
owner of a court which tried local disputes; but he rarely possessed that
criminal jurisdiction in matters of life and death which was common in
continental feudalism; and if he did, it was only by special royal grant,
and he was gradually deprived of it by the development of royal courts
of justice, which drew to themselves large parts of manorial
jurisdiction.
These and other matters were reserved for the old courts of the shire
and hundred, which the Norman kings found it advisable to encourage
as a check upon their barons; for the more completely the natives and
villagers were subjected to their lords, the more necessary was it for the
king to maintain his hold upon their masters. For this reason William
imposed the famous Salisbury oath. In France the sub-tenant was
bound to follow and obey his immediate lord rather than the king.
William was determined that every man's duty to the king should come
first. Similarly, he separated church courts from the secular courts, in
order that the former might be saved from the feudal influence of the
latter; and he enforced the ecclesiastical reforms of Hildebrand,
especially the prohibition of the marriage of the clergy, lest they should
convert their benefices into hereditary fiefs for the benefit of their
children.
For the principles of heredity and primogeniture were among the
strongest of feudal tendencies. Primogeniture had proved politically
advantageous; and one of the best things in the Anglo-Saxon monarchy
had been its avoidance of the practice, prevalent on the Continent, of
kings dividing their dominions among their sons, instead of leaving all
united to the eldest. But the principle of heredity, sound enough in
national monarchy,