Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/170

 162 BARONY AND THANAQE April Long after the reasonable relief for a knight's fee had been fixed at 100s., the relief for a barony held by knight-service remained variable at the king's pleasure,^ and when fixed by Magna Carta (c. 2), was fixed at £100 as against IOO5. for a knight's fee.- Mr. Round has recently pointed out ^ that Magna Carta by thus drawing a distinction between the relief due from a barony and that due from a knight's fee drew a sharp distinction between the baron, the man who held by barony, and the knight, the man who held by simple knight-service. As he has also proved that the distinction between the reliefs was in no way dependent either on the amount of land held or on the amount of knight- service due from it, save that single fee baronies paid but IOO5.,* we are constrained to believe that it was the effect rather than the cause of the distinction between tenure by barony and tenure by knight-service. Then there are the ' legal consequences of a subordinate kind '. In his famous chapter on Dignities, Bracton, after describing the creation of an earl, goes on : ' Sunt et alii, potentes sub rege, qui dicuntur barones ', distinguishing them from the king, though calling the former ' viri magnae dignitatis ', or more shortly, ' magnatae '.^ Then in another chapter, after recounting how a manor, ' si sit caput baroniae ', may not be assigned in dower nor partitioned among co-heirs,^ he adds, vel aliis minoribus feodis quam baronia, quia caput non habent sicut baronia ; et quod dicitur de baronia et barone, servari debet in comitatu et comite '.' Clearly, in Bracton 's eyes the distinction between baronia and vavasoria, that is, between tenure by barony and tenure by knight-service,^ lay in the possession of a caput baroniae, just as that between barons and vavasors ^ This was the relief recently established as reasonable for a barony in Normandy Tres Ancien Coutumier, c. Ixxxv), but the English exchequer for fiscal purposes deemed a barony to contain 13i knights' fees and exacted 1 mark from a baron against 1 shilling from a knight (Annals of Waverley, p. 29G, c. 1222), and when the Charter was confirmed in 1297, this ratio was established between their reliefs, the baron's being reduced to 100 marks, i. e. 131 times a knight's. ' ' " Barons " and " Knights " in the Great Charter ' : Magna Carta Connnemoration Essays, p. 71. * Ibid. pp. 64 fT. daughter or her heirs; but it was pleaded in 1218 that ever since the conquest of England, it had been the king's prerogative right that if any of his barons died leaving daughters as his heirs, and the elder-bom daughters had been married in their father's lifetime, the king might give the youngest daughter to one of his knights with the whole of her father's lands, to the exclusion of her elder sisters {Bracton's Note-book, pi. 12). ' Bracton, De Legibus, ii. 39. § 6. ' Guilhiermoz, Essai sur Vorigine de la noblesse en France au moyen dge, p. 64, n. 31.
 * vavasores ' and ' milites ', to whom he ascribes no power under
 * Quod dicitur de baronia, non est observandum in vavasoria,
 * Glanvill, ix. 4 ; Dialogus de Scaccario, ii. 24.
 * Bracton, De Legibua et Consuetudinibus Angliae (Rolls Series), i. 8.
 * Ibid. ii. 39 (pp. 59, 61). If the lands were divided, the caput went to the eldest