Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/177

 1920 BARONY AND THANAGE 169 knight, when in the mercy of the duke, paid IO5., the baron, like the count, the archbishop, the bishop, and the abbot, had to pay £100.1 The resemblance between the obligations and legal conse- quences of tenure by barony in Normandy and in England is so close that we cannot but ask ourselves whether the explanation must not have been the same in both cases, namely, that in the one country as in the other, barony was an hereditary office to which were attached rights of public justice. That English barons had courts we know ; but did they have them as barons, and was having a court so much the essence of barony that all who had such courts were deemed to hold by barony ? If so, what justiciary rights did barons have in England ? To answer these questions it is of the first importance to determine the meaning attached to baro in the earliest English documents in which it is found. Old English law was, of course, never abrogated and French law introduced by a comprehensive enactment after the Conquest. . . . The Norman lord usually got his title and claimed his rights on the strength, not of separate and express grants, but of a general assignment of all the titles and rights that had been possessed by his Saxon predecessors.^ So it is without surprise that we find that it was as the Norman equivalent of the Saxon thegn that baro was first used in England. For long, indeed, it was doubtful whether the old name would not hold its own against the newcomer. Many of the Conqueror's charters were addressed to 'alle mine thegnes' just as Edward the Confessor's had been, ministri or ballivi being used as the equivalent in the Latin versions.^ In Domesday Book itself the barones were but rarely mentioned, whereas archbishops, bishops, and abbots as well as great Norman lords like Earl Hugh and Ilbert de Lacy are called taini} Baro is indeed used in both the French and the Latin versions of the ' Leis Willelme ' (1090-1135) instead of the ' thegn ' of the Saxon laws incorporated in them ; but in the 'Instituta Cnuti' (c. 1103), the earliest of the Latin versions of Cnut's laws, neither baro nor vavasor occurs, the writer preferring ' liberalis homo, id est Thegen ' for the one and ' mediocris homo ' for the other. Similarly, the writer of the ' Consiliatio Cnuti' (c. 1110) uses ' procer uel uirro ' for thegn, not baro. Even in the ' Leges ' Tres Ancien Coutumier, c. Ivi : ' Si quens {comes) ou barons ou archevesques ou evesques ou abes est chaux en merci, il en paiera c livres, chevaliers paiera al moina XV 8. ou neant ; vilains ou bas homs vs. ou neant.' ^ Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, i. 46 n. Compare the charters in H. W. C. Davis's Regesta Regum Normannorum with those in Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus, iv. 195 ff.
 * Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, pp. 2-3.
 * Domesday Book, i. 56 b.