Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/809

Rh and gentry) to the consent of the crown; and in some instances large sums were paid for the privilege; Simon de Montfort paying Henry III a sum, equivalent to five hundred thousand dollars at present, for permission to control the marriage of the heir of Gilbert d'Unfrankville. Mr. Dowell, in his History of Taxation in England, quotes the following as among one of the "fiscal curiosities" to be found on the Rolls of the Exchequer during the early Norman period: "Ralph Bardolph fines in five marks for leave to rise from his infirmity. The Bishop of Winchester owes a tonnell of good wine for not reminding the king (John) about a girdle for the Countess of Abunarle; and Robert de Vaux fines in five of the best palfreys that the same king would hold his tongue about the wife of Henry Pinel."

Another branch of the ancient revenues of the English crown worthy of special notice from its singular recognition within a comparatively recent period, was the right to "royal fish," meaning thereby the whale and the sturgeon, when the same were either cast ashore or caught near the coast; and which were originally acquired by the crown on the assumption that the sovereign guarded and protected the seas from pirates and robbers. This perquisite had so long been in abeyance that its sanction by law was hardly recognized in 1850, when the Duke of Wellington, as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, claimed and exacted the price—fifty pounds—of the carcass of a whale brought ashore and sold by certain boatmen on the coast of Kent. A point of contention was made by the boatmen, that since the law was enacted, natural science had proved that the whale was not a fish; but the duke insisted upon his right under the letter of the law of compact with his office of warden—i. e., to protect the seas—as representative of the sovereign, and maintained it. He, however, subsequently practically admitted the lack of any moral foundation for his claim by dividing the price, after it had been formally paid him, with the boatmen.

—Previous to the reign of Henry II of England (1154), the "tenure" or holding of lands from the crown required the personal attendance, at his own expense, of every tenant—knight or baron—with a certain number of retainers, upon the king in arms, for a period of forty days in each year; and failure to attend, or render the quota of men required by the tenure, would have involved a forfeiture of the tenant's lands for nonperformance of duty. Such a military system, however sufficient for home protection or border warfare, proved ill adapted to foreign wars, which in the case of France were for a long period almost continuous; inasmuch as in those days of slow traveling a forty days' service upon a distant expedition would have been of little account. For what could be more