Page:Source Problems in English History.djvu/64

 Source Problems in English History

The kings were so strong in England after the Conquest that warfare among the feudal nobles was seldom possible; also the whole body of knights was less and less frequently summoned to service abroad. Service in the king's court and central assemblies was not enforced upon the lesser tenants-in-chief, most of whom were knights. The knights, then, were not doing much in a military or political way to distinguish them from the class of freeholders. They stayed at home, ran their estates profitably, intermarried to some extent with the freeholders, and became familiar with all sorts of county business. Judged by continental standards, they were leading an unknightly life. When matters hardened in the later middle ages, it is found that the knights, the English gentry, had not the slightest legal or political right to distinguish them from the non-noble freemen. The distinction was social. Thus England's middle class virtually included all between a very small group of great barons (later the peers of the House of Lords) and the villeins. It was in this great group that men available for sworn-inquest purposes were oftenest found. And the government was not slow to learn that in the knights responsibility, honesty, and information were oftenest found together.¹

All this assumes that there was a central government strong enough to use the middle classes for its own purposes and intelligent enough to develop this use in an orderly and progressive way. The big part played by the Conquest itself in giving the central government a unique opportunity in England and the strength and in-

¹ Of course if the king needed information which could best be gotten from either great nobles or villeins, he was as ready to use the sworn inquest with them as with the middle class; but for the routine kinds of local business knights or freeholders served best.