Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/331

1922 his military obligations by either (i) service, his servitium debitum, or (ii) payment of scutage, or (iii) payment of a fine. With the reign of John there opens a third phase in the history of the levy. Owing to a variety of causes, among which the ruralization of the lesser tenants and the increasingly heavy cost of equipment must be assigned a prominent place, it was becoming at the close of the twelfth century virtually impossible for the Crown to exact from its immediate vassals their full service. Henry II and Richard I were obliged on several occasions to content themselves with the muster of a specified fraction of the total feudal levy of the realm; and under John what had been an occasional expedient gradually developed into a regular practice. By the middle of the thirteenth century the option had passed entirely away from the Crown, and the reduced service had come to be all that was 'recognized' as due from their holdings by most of the greater tenants in chief. A new servitium debitum had in effect been evolved. This sweeping reduction in service did not extend to fiscal matters, for we find that the alternatives to (i) attendance in the host, with the recognized quota, were (ii) payment of scutage upon the full traditional number of fees, or (iii) payment of a fine on the customary plan. Thus the method of payment was not affected, although the actual rate of commutation increased in inverse proportion to the reduction in service. Throughout the period the tenant in chief who discharged his obligations by either of the three methods of service, fine, or scutage was entitled, under sanction of a royal writ, to reimburse himself in part or in full by collecting scutage for his own use from his sub-vassals. The names of tenants who served or fined appeared in the Pipe Roll, side by side with the scutage account, under the special heading 'Isti habent quietanciam per breve regis'.

As far therefore as the first half of the thirteenth century is concerned, Maitland's conjectures have been effectively disproved. Scutage continued, however, to be levied during a further hundred years, and the later period in its history has received no adequate attention from modern authorities. Dr. Mitchell leaves it entirely outside the scope of his treatise; Dr. J. F. Baldwin dismisses it in a few pages; while Dr. J. E. Morris, although he considers in some detail the first scutage of Edward I, does not pursue his investigations far enough to arrive at the true explanation of the facts which he records. The investigation of which the results are embodied in the present article