Page:The histories of Launceston and Dunheved, in the county of Cornwall.djvu/274

 246 THE CASTLE. Norman. In the nineteenth year of his reign (1085) an invasion from Denmark was apprehended. The military constitution of the Saxons had been laid aside, and as no other had as yet been definitely substituted for it, the kingdom was in a measure defenceless. When the danger was over, the king held a great council to enquire into the state of the nation. The immediate consequence of this convention was the compiling of Domesday. The book was completed in the following year, and the king then assembled all his nobility at Sarum. There the principal landholders sub- mitted their lands to the yoke of military tenure, and did homage and fealty to the king. From that moment it became a fundamental although fictitious maxim of English tenures, that the king is the original proprietor of all the land in his kingdom, and that no man possesses any part of it but what has mediately or immediately been derived as a gift from him, to be held upon certaht services. These services were varied according to the necessities or the will of the donor. The earls held Dunheved and its castle in capite ; i.e. in chief, directly from the Crown. We will show the kind of grant which some of those earls made to their inferiors, and the services reserved. In 1284 (12 Ed. I.) Robert Hurdyn held an acre of land and a bakehouse in the town of the Castle of Lanceveton, by the serjeantry (servitude) of being in the Castle of Lanceveton, with an iron helmet and a Danish hatchet, (pole-axe) for forty days in the time of war at his own proper costs ; and, after the forty days, if the lord of the castle chose to detain him in the same castle, it was to be at the expense of the lord. In the same year Robert de Wena held three Cornish acres of land in the town of Pengevel in chief of our lord the king, by the serjeantry of finding five soldiers at the