Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/187

 1920 BABONY AND THANAGE 179 For concrete proof of the inferences as to the nature of barony and its relation to thanage which we have 'drawn from the legal literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we turn naturally to that part of the land last brought under Norman influence — to Northumberland and Cumberland, which were only won by the Norman kings a generation later than the rest of the country, when the tide of Norman immigration had spent itself, and to Lothian, where old English laws and institutions lived on hardly touched by Norman influence before the accession of David I in 1124, by which time they had spread everywhere south of the Highland line. It is indeed in Scotland that we can most easily determine the nature of barony in these islands and its relation to thanage ; for there no doubt has ever arisen about either. When David I introduced baro into his charters, he did so with full knowledge of the meaning attached to the word by the Anglo-Norman chancery ; for he had used it himself in charters issued by him as earl of Northampton.^ Therefore, when he began to address his charters ' baronibus, vicecomitibus, ministris, et omnibus fidelibus suis totius Loudeniae ',^ instead of ' omnibus suis fidelibus Tegnis et Drengis de Lodenie ',^ he must have seen between the thane and the baron the same likeness that the Norman clerks saw when they were at that very time using ' baro ' as the equivalent of ' thegn ' in their translations of Anglo- Saxon law. Almost certainly, David's purpose in thus renaming his thanes and drengs barons was to impose on them the burdens attached to barony in England, i.e. wardship, marriage, and relief ; but so far as relief was concerned he failed, save when knight-service was rendered. So in Scotland thanage lived on to the fifteenth century as a distinct and recognized variety of tenure by barony,* barons falling into one of two classes, according as they held their lands in fee-farm or by knight-service.^ The tenant by thanage, the thane, held his lands in fee-farm, paying the king a fixed farm for all rents and dues arising within his thanage save ' cain ', the king's share in the produce of the land, which was paid in cattle, corn, or hens, according to the wealth and status of the tenants, and ' waiting ', a food-rent • e. g. charter to the monks of Daventry, c. 1 1 14-24 ; Lawrie, Early Scottish Charters, no. li. ^ Charter for Dunfermline, c. 1130 ; ibid. no. xci. ' Charter for Coldingham, c. 1117 ; ibid. no. xxx. in Scotland in the fifteenth century, of which 3 were south of the Forth, 50 were between Forth and Spey, and 10 were beyond Spey. This is not the place to consider whether the thanes north of the Forth were Celtic ' toisachs ' renamed, or were created by Malcolm Canmore and his sons in deliberate imitation of the thanes they found in Lothian, but so far as the present writer's researches go they support the former opinion. ' Ibid. i. 186. N2
 * Skene, in Fordun's Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, ii. 449, gives a list of 63 thanages