Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/432

418 purveyance, the excise upon ale, beer, and other liquor."

Even Macaulay sees little farther, and makes a gross blunder in stating the simple fact. At the commencement of the second chapter of the first volume of his popular edition of his history, he says, "The history of England, during the seventeenth century, is the history of the transformation of a limited monarchy, constituted after the fashion of the middle ages, into a liberal monarchy, suited to the more advanced state of society in which the public charges can be no longer borne by the estates of the crown, and in which the public defence can be no longer trusted to a feudal militia." He then simply tells us that feudal rights and tenures perished with the crown under the commonwealth, and that at the restoration they were abolished by statute, and that "no relic of the ancient tenures was suffered to remain, except those honorary services which are still, at a coronation, rendered to the person of the sovereign by some lords of manors." And with this slight notice he dismisses the greatest event of modern English history, excepting the establishment of the commonwealth, and the revolution of 1688. In the last portion of the passage, however, he commits a singular oversight, for so far from it being the case that no relic of the feudal tenures was left; the truth was, that whilst the aristocracy freed themselves from their obligations to the crown, they expressly retained the obligations due to themselves from the lesser tenants, namely, all the manorial rights, including the great one of copyhold. Lingard gives a more accurate and comprehensive relation of this great fact.

"But while they (the two houses) provided for the sovereign, they were not unmindful of their own interests. In the preceding reigns, the proprieters of lands had frequently and zealously sought to abolish tenures by knights' service, confessedly the most onerous of the existing feudal burdens; but their attempts were constantly defeated by the monarch and his courtiers, unwilling to resign the benefits of marriages, reliefs, and wardships. Now, however, in this season of reconciliation and mutual concession, the proposal was made and accepted; the terms were arranged to the satisfaction of both parties, and Charles consented to accept a fixed annual income of one hundred thousand pounds in place of the casual but lucrative profits of the court of wards. Still the transaction did little honour to the liberality of the two houses. They refused to extend the benefit to the inferior tenures; and the very act which relieved the lords of the manors from ''the services which they owed to the crown, confirmed to them the services which they claimed from those who held by tenure of copyright. Neither did they choose to pay the price of the benefit, though it teas to be enjoyed exclusively by themselves. Originally, the authors of the measure intended to raise the compensation by a tax on the lands which had been relieved;'' the amount had actually been apportioned to the several counties by the committee, when a member, as it were accidentally, asked why they should not resort to the excise. The suggestion was eagerly caught by the courtiers and many of the proprietors. The injustice of compelling the poor to pay for the relief of the rich, though strongly urged, was contemptuously overlooked; and the friends of the motion, on a division in full house, obtained a majority of two. In lieu, therefore, of purveyance, military tenures, and their various incidents, fruits, and dependencies, the produce of one moiety of the excise, a constantly grounding and more profitable branch of revenue than the original compensation, was settled on the crown for ever."—Vol. xi., pp. 195–6, small edition. Lingard curtly adds that soon after they gave the crown the other moiety of the excise, "then producing about three hundred thousand pounds per annum, but now swelled to eighteen million pounds per annum."

Blackstone, however, in his Commentaries, vol. i. pp. 289 and 309, and vol. ii. pp. 77 and 767, throws a far broader light on these transactions and their consequences. He reminds us of the imposition of the various feudal burdens by William the Conqueror on those of his followers, to whom, according to the feudal system, he granted lands For every grant of a certain quantity of land, called a knight's feud, fief, or fee, the said grantee was bound to do personal service in the army of the granter, or feudal lord, forty days in every year, if called upon. "But," says Blackstone, "this personal attendance growing troublesome in many respects, the tenants found means of compounding for it, by first sending others in their stead, and in process of time, by making pecuniary satisfaction to the crown in lieu of it. This pecuniary satisfaction came to be levied by assessment, at so much for every knight's fee, under the name of scutages.

But this knight service, as it was called, involved other exactions, taxes, and subjections, as first—, or sums to be paid by the tenant to ransom his lord if taken prisoner, or to make his eldest son a knight, or to marry his eldest daughter. "To which," adds Blackstone, "the tyranny of lords by degrees exacted more and more, as aids to pay the lord's debts, and to enable him to pay aids or reliefs to his superior lord, from which last the king's tenants, in capite, of course, were exempt, as they held immediately of the king, who had no superior, but were paid by those who, according to the feudal system, received grants at second or third hand. Second—, or fines paid to the lord by the new tenant on taking up his land, upon the death of the father or old tenant. Third—, which was paid only by the king's tenants in capite, and was a whole year's profits of the estate, or first fruits, afterwards, by the avarice of the popes, demanded from the clergy. Fourth—, or the custody of the body and estate of rumors who held under the king. This not only implied that the lord had custody of the body and lands of the ward, without giving any account of the profits till the male ward was twenty-one, and the female sixteen, but also the right to give them in marriage, or levy heavy exactions on them: "These," he continues, "were the principal qualities, fruits, and consequences of tenure by knight service, or tenure by which the greatest part of the lands in these kingdoms were holden, and that principally of the king in capite, till the middle of the last century."

"The families of all our nobles," he says, "groaned under these intolerable burdens, which, in consequence of the fiction adopted after the Conquest, were introduced and levied upon them by the subtlety and finesse of the Norman lawyers. For," he adds, "summing up the facts to which we have referred, besides the scutages to which they were