Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/400



the payment was arbitrary and extortionate. Henry promises that the heir of a tenant-in-chief shall not be constrained to redeem—to buy back—his father's lands as had been done in his brother's time; he shall relieve them by a just and lawful relief. Under Rufus then it was held that the land had, by the former holder's death, actually passed to the king, as the common heir of all men, and that, if the son or other representative of the former holder wished to possess it, he must, in the strictest sense, buy it back from the king. Henry acknowledges the rights of the heir, while still maintaining the theory of the fresh grant. The heir is not to redeem—to buy back—his father's land; he is merely to relieve it—to take it up again, and he is to pay only the sum prescribed by legal custom, the equivalent of the ancient heriot or the modern succession-duty. So it is with personal property. The Red King, it is plain, claimed to be the heir of men's money, as well as of their land. For one of Henry's promised reforms is that the wills of his barons and others his men shall stand good, that their money shall go to the purposes to which they may have bequeathed it, and that, if they die without wills, their wives, children, kinsfolk, or lawful men, shall dispose of it as they may think best for the dead man's soul. Such a reform could not have been needed unless William Rufus had been in the habit of interfering with men's free right of bequest. And it might have been plausibly argued that the right of bequest was no natural