Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/398

 *











with all its mean and pettifogging incidents, was put into a systematic form for the special benefit of the coffers of the king who was before all things the good knight, the preux chevalier, the probus miles. The King "would be the heir of ilk man, ordered and lewd." To that end the estate of the minor heir was to be made a prey; he was himself to be begged and granted and sold like an ox or an ass; the heiress, maid or widow, was in the like sort to be begged and granted, sold into unwilling wedlock, or else forced to pay the price which a chivalrous tenure demanded for the right either to remain unmarried or to marry according to her own will. The bishopric or the abbey was to be left without a pastor, and its lands were to be let to farm for the King's profit, because the King would be the heir of the priest as well as of the layman. That all this, in its fully developed and systematic form, was the work of Randolf Flambard, I hope I may now assume. I have argued the point at some length elsewhere, and I need not now do more than pass lightly over some of the main points. Certain tendencies, certain customs, of which, under the Conqueror and even before the Conqueror, we see the germs, but only the germs, appear at the accession of Henry the First as firmly established rules, which Henry does not promise wholly to abolish, while he does promise to redress their abuses. It follows that they had put on their systematic shape in the intermediate time, that is, during the reign of Rufus. One of these abuses, that which for obvious reasons was most largely dwelled on by our authorities, namely the new way of dealing with ecclesiastical property, is distinctly spoken of as a