Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/402

 comfort of thinking that his estate would, perhaps for the next twenty years, go to enrich the coffers of his sovereign. On this head Henry speaks less clearly than he speaks on some other points; but his words certainly seem to imply that the wardship of the tenant-in-chief was to go, not to the king, but to the mother or to some kinsman. If so, either Henry himself or his successors thought better of the matter. The right of wardship, as a privilege of the king or other lord, appears in full force in the law-book of Randolf of Glanville.

When we attribute all these exactions and "unrighteousnesses" to the device of Flambard, it is of course not meant that they were altogether unheard of either before his day or beyond the lands over which his influence reached. Traces of these claims, or of some of them, are to be found wherever and whenever feudal notions about the tenure of land had crept in. All that is meant is that claims which were vaguely growing up were put by Flambard into a distinct and systematic shape. What William the Great did on occasion, for reasons of state, William the Red did as a matter of course, as an ordinary means of making money. And it is significant that two of the most oppressive of these claims, that of wardship and the kindred claim of marriage, were, in their fully developed shape, peculiar or nearly so to the lands where Rufus reigned and Flambard governed, to the English kingdom and the Norman duchy. I have said elsewhere that, of the two sides of feudalism, our Norman kings carefully shut out the side which tended to