Page:History of Manchester (1771), Volume 1, by John Whitaker.djvu/289

238 privilege of occupancy, and have made them all his own. He must have then granted them out to his principal followers, aligning each of them his particular proportion, and obliging each of them to particular returns for it. And these must have continued obligatory upon the lands, and have descended to the present proprietors under the Romans. Such continued among the Britons of Wales to the sixteenth century. Such remained, among the Britons of Ireland to the seventeenth.

Immediately below the sovereign ranked the equites or knights, the Uchelwyrion, magnates, or high men, holding their lands immediately from the crown, and presiding as lords over their particular domains. As the immediate tenants of the crown, they were obliged by their tenures to certain services to it, the express conditions of their fees, and all honourable in their natures. Some retained their lands under a tenure which strongly resembled the grand serjeanty of the Normans, the duty of attendance upon the king at dinner, and the obligation of personal services to him at it, to hold the king's feet in their bosom and to rub him with a flesh-brush. But most were particularly bound upon summons to attend the sovereign in arms, and to follow him to the war. This was denominated the Gwaeth Milwyr or the service of the soldier, being borne at their own expence whenever and as often as they were carried into the field within the limits of their own country, and once annually without them, for the period of six weeks. And they were bound to engage always at the call in the construction or reparation of the royal castles. They were also assessed with rents either in money or in kind, but stated in their value and gentle in their amount. For a fee containing about a thousand acres of land, the knight, immediately before the commencement of winter, remitted to the king's palace an horse-load of his best wheat reduced to flour, one oxe, a barrel of mead nine palms in length and eighteen in breadth, or two barrels of braget or four of common ale, and one hundred and sixty-eight equal threaves of oats for the stable, a sow three years old, a salted gammon three inches in thickness, and a pot of butter three palms long