Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/174

 166 BARONY AND TUANAGE April all, why did Bracton classify barons with earls and distinguish them from other magnates as having power under the king, if as barons they held no office and had no jurisdictional power ? While these questions remain unanswered we cannot claim to know what tenure by barony was. To seek in the first instance among English sources for fresh evidence is probably useless. For, as to the eleventh and twelfth centuries the documentary evidence is too fragmentary to be easily interpreted ; and as to the thirteenth century, when our records first became copious and continuous, feudalism as an administrative and military system was already in decay. English institutions, however, are but local variations of European ones, and we must look to foreign, and particularly to French, sources for aid in interpreting English one&. As it happens, this method is peculiarly suitable for investigating the problem of tenure by barony. For baro and baronia are words of French origin unused in England until after the Norman Conquest ; and it is, to say the least, unlikely that the Normans, who carried these words to Sicily and to Scotland,^ using them always with the same meaning, used them with another in England, bound as this country was to Normandy for a hundred and fifty years so much more closely than either of the others ever was. As Mr. Haskins has pointed out,^ ' Wholly distinct the two adminis- trations ' of England and Normandy ' cannot have been ; for so long as kingship was ambulatory and the government centred in the royal household, a considerable number of the king's officers must have been common to the kingdom and the duchy, and even when other departments became stationary, the chancery and the chapel continued to follow the king '. When, therefore, in English documents of the eleventh and twelfth centuries we find baro and baronia used technically, especially in opposition to vavasor and vavasoria,^ the presumption is strong that they bear the same meaning as they do in Norman documents of the same period. M, Guilhiermoz has used this argument to prove that in England as in Normandy vavasor and vavasoria were technical names for the simple knight and his holding as opposed to the baron and his barony ; it is just as valid in respect of baro and baronia. What then was the meaning attached to these words in Normandy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries ? Baro is a Low Latin word of uncertain derivation, first met with in French documents of the eighth century, where it is used instead of vir ' Guilhiermoz, p. 158, n. 54 ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, pp. 3, 23-4. ' p. 112. hundred.
 * e. g. in Henry I's letter ordering the holding of the courts of the shire and the