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464 canonical elections, the fiscal interests of the secular power had to be satisfied by the diversion of ecclesiastical revenues for a year or a similar customary period for the benefit of the Crown or of other secular patrons. There were other occasional rights connected with a breach of the continuity of possession, which would not arise out of vacancies in ecclesiastical institutions; such were wardship and marriage, which accrued to the lords in cases when fiefs descended to minors or to unmarried females. These eventualities gave rise to very lucrative rights, and it is a matter of common knowledge to what extent such opportunities were liable to be misused. The English Charters contained provisions against these abuses, but even in their mitigated form these practices were likely to produce much hardship. Special classes of misdeeds arose in connexion with them: we hear of judicial proceedings taken on account of ravishment (kidnapping) of wards and of ravishment of heiresses in order to get the profits, even when the corresponding right belonged to some one else or was contested. From such exactions ecclesiastical tenements were free, and this alone would have sufficed to make the passage of landed property into the hands of the churches undesirable from the feudal point of view. No wonder powerful kings tried to restrict the passage of estates into the "dead hand" (manus mortua) of the Church. This was among other things the aim of Edward I's Statute De religiosis.

Although these reassertions of the dominium directum forcibly shewed that the proprietary rights of the lord were by no means a dead letter, the "useful domain" was protected from wanton interruption by clearly established customs. The beneficia, which preceded fiefs in historical evolution, were assumed to be granted for life, but when fiefs developed out of them they nearly always became hereditary. The only exception of any importance is presented by the beneficia militaria of French Navarre.

As political subjection was regarded as a matter of contract, the feudal nexus tended towards a disruption of sovereignty, and often led in practice to the formation of numerous political bodies within the boundaries of historical States. This was especially the case in France, Germany and Italy. An authoritative jurist like Beaumanoir summarised the position in the saying, "chaque baron est souverain dans sa baronie"; and the mottoes chosen by some of the French magnates gave expression to an unmeasured feeling of self-sufficiency. The Rohans of Brittany boasted: "prince ne daigne, roi ne puis, Rohan je suis." The seigneur of Coucy, a barony which gave great trouble to the early Capetian kings, disguised his pride by mock humility: "je ne suis ni comte, ni marquis, je suis le sire de Coucy." In Germany the dismemberment of sovereignty was finally recognised by express law in Charles IV's Golden Bull of 1336 in favour of the seven Electors, but it had already been acknowledged in regard to princes in general by Frederick II, and had been acted upon more or less all through the eleventh and twelfth