which the lord and vassal of the feudal law bore to the patron and client of the Roman republic; between whom also there subsisted a mutual fealty, or engagement of defence and protection. For with regard to the matter of aids, there were three which were usually raised by the client; viz. to marry the patron's daughter; to pay his debts; and to redeem his person from captivity.

2. Relief, relevium, was before mentioned as incident to every feudal tenure, by way of fine or composition with the lord for taking up the estate, which was lapsed or fallen in by the death of the last tenant. But relief was only payable, if the heir at the death of his ancestor had attained his full age of one-and-twenty years.

3. Primer seisin was a feudal burthen, only incident to the king's tenants, and not to those who held of inferior lords. It was a right which the king had when any of his tenants died seised of a knight's fee, to receive of the heir, provided he were of full age, one whole year's profits of the lands, if they were in immediate possession; and half a year's profits, if the lands were in reversion expectant on an estate for life.

4. These payments were only due if the heir was of full age; but if he was under the age of twenty-one, being a male, or fourteen, being a female, the lord was entitled to the wardship of the heir, and was called the guardian in chivalry. This wardship consisted in having the custody of the body and lands of such heir, without any account of the profits, till the age of twenty-one in males and sixteen. in females.

When the male heir arrived to the age of twenty-one, or the heir female to that of sixteen, they might sue out their livery or ousterlemain; that is, the delivery of their lands out of their guardian's hands. For this they were obliged to pay a fine, namely, half a year's profits of the land; though this seems expressly contrary to magna charta. However, in consequence of their lands having been so long in ward, they were excused all reliefs, and the king's tenants also all primer seisins.

When the heir thus came of full age, provided he held a knight's fee in capite under the crown, he was to receive the order of knighthood, and was compellable to take it upon him, or else pay a fine to the king. For, in those heroical times, no person was qualified for deeds of arms

and chivalry who had not received this order, which was conferred with much preparation and solemnity. We may plainly discover the footsteps of a similar custom in what Tacitus relates of the Germans, who, in order to qualify their young men to bear arms, presented them in a full assembly with a shield and lance; which ceremony, as was formerly hinted, is supposed to have been the original of the feudal knighthood. This prerogative, of compelling the king's vassals to be knighted, or to pay a fine, was expressly recognised in parliament by the statute de militibus, 1 Edw. II.; was exerted as an expedient for raising money by many of our best princes, particularly by Edw. VI. and queen Elizabeth; but yet was the occasion of heavy murmurs when exerted by Charles I.; among whose many misfortunes it was, that neither himself nor his people seemed able to distinguish between the arbitrary stretch, and the legal exertion, of prerogative. However, among the other concessions made by that unhappy prince, before the fatal recourse to arms, he agreed to divest himself of this undoubted flower of the crown, and it was accordingly abolished by statute 16 Car. I. c. 20.

5. But, before they came of age, there was still another piece of authority, which the guardian was at liberty to exercise over his infant wards; I mean the right of marriage, (maritagium, as contradistinguished from matrimony,) which in its feudal sense signifies the power, which the lord or guardian in chivalry had, of disposing of his infant ward in matrimony. For, while the infant was in ward, the guardian had the power of tendering him or her a suitable match, without disparagement or inequality: which if the infants refused, they forfeited the value of the marriage to their guardian; that is, so much as a jury would assess, or any one would bona fide give to the guardian for such an alliance: and if the infants married themselves without the guardian's consent, they forfeited double the value. This seems to have been one of the greatest hardships of our ancient tenures. There were indeed substantial reasons why the lord should have the restraint and controul of the ward's marriage, especially of his female ward; because of their tender years, and the danger of such female ward's intermarrying with the lord's enemy: but no tolerable pretence could be assigned why the lord should have the sale, or value of the marriage.

6. Another attendant or consequence of tenure by knight service, was that of fines due to the lord for every alienation, whenever the tenant had occasion to make over his land to another. With us in England, these fines seem only to have been exacted from the king's tenants in capite.

7. The last consequence of tenure in chivalry was escheat; which is the determination of the tenure, or dissolution of the mutual bond between the lord and tenant from the extinction of the blood of the latter by either natural or civil means; if he died without heirs of his blood, or if his blood was corrupted and stained by commission of treason or felony; whereby every inheritable quality was entirely blotted out and abolished. In such cases the land escheated, or fell back, to the lord of the fee; that is, the tenure was determined by breach of the original condition expressed or implied in the feudal donation. In the one case, there were no heirs subsisting of the blood of the first feudatory or purchaser, to which heirs alone the grant of the feud extended; in the other, the tenant, by perpetrating an atrocious crime, shewed that he was no longer to be trusted as a vassal, having forgotten his duty as a subject, and therefore forfeited his feud, which he held under the implied condition that he should not be a traitor or a felon. The consequences of which in both cases was, that the gift, being determined, resulted back to the lord who it.

gave

These were the principal qualities, fruits, and consequences of tenure by knight-service: a tenure, by which the greatest part of the lands in this kingdom were holden, and that principally of the king in capite, till the middle of the last century* and which was created, as sir Edward Coke expressly testifies, for a military purpose, viz. for defence of the realm by the king's own principal subjects, which was judged to be much better than to trust to hirelings or foreigners. The description here given is that of a knight-service proper; which was to attend the king in his wars. There were also some other species of knight-service; so called, though improperly, because the service or render was of a free and honourable nature, and equally uncertain as to the time of rendering as that of knight-service proper, and because they were attended with similar fruits and conse

*Blackstone wrote before the year 1800.

quences. Such was the tenure by grand serjeanty, per magnum servitium, whereby the tenant was bound, instead of serving the king generally in his wars, to do some special honorary service to the king in person; as to carry his banner, his sword, or the like; or to be his butler, champion, or other officer, at his coronation. It was in most other respects like knight-service, only he was not bound to pay aid, or escuage; and, when tenant by knight-service paid five pounds for a relief on every knight's fee, tenant by grand serjeanty paid one year's value of his land, were it much or little. Tenure by cornage, which was to wind a horn when the Scots or other enemies entered the land, in order to warn the king's subjects, was, like other services of the same nature, a species of grand serjeanty.

These services, both of chivalry and grand serjeanty, were all personal, and uncertain as to their quantity or duration. But, the personal attendance in knight-service growing troublesome and inconvenient in many respects, the tenants found means of compounding for it; by first sending others in their stead, and in process of time making a pecuniary satisfaction to the lords in lieu of it. This pecuniary satisfaction at last came to be levied by assessments, at so much for every knight's fee; and therefore this kind of tenure was called scutagium in Latin, or servitium scuti; scutum being then a well-known denomination for money*: and, in like manner, it was called, in our northern French, escuage; being indeed a pecuniary instead of a military service. The first time this appears to have been taken was in the 5 Hen. II., on account of his expedition to Toulouse; but it soon came to be so universal, that personal attendance fell quite into disuse. Hence we find, in our ancient histories, that, from this period, when our kings went to war, they levied scutages on their tenants, that is, on all the landholders of the kingdom, to defray their expenses, and to hire troops; and these assessments, in the time of Henry II., seem to have been made arbitrarily and at the king's pleasure. Which prerogative being greatly abused by his successors, it became matter of national clamour; and king John was obliged to consent, by his magna charta, that no scutage should be imposed without

* Hence in modern French ecu, spelt in the older writers escu, a crown, and the Italian scudo.

consent of parliament. But this clause was omitted in his son Henry III.'s charter; where we only find that scutages or escuage should be taken as they were used to be taken in the time of Henry II.; that is, in a reasonable and moderate manner. Yet afterwards by statute 25 Edw. I. c. 5, 6, and many subsequent statutes, it was again provided that the king should take no aids or tasks but by the common assent of the realm: hence it was held in our old books, that escuage or scutage could not be levied but by consent of parliament; such scutages being indeed the ground-work of all succeeding subsidies, and the land-tax of later times.

By the degenerating of knight-service, or personal military duty, into escuage, or pecuniary assessments, all the advantages, either promised or real, of the feudal constitution were destroyed, and nothing but the hardships remained. Instead of forming a national militia composed of barons, knights, and gentlemen, bound by their interest, their honour, and their oaths, to defend their king and country, the whole of this system of tenures now tended to nothing else, but a wretched means of raising money to pay an army of occasional mercenaries. In the mean time the families of all our nobility and gentry groaned under the intolerable burthens, which, in consequence of the fiction adopted after the conquest, were introduced and laid upon them by the subtlety and finesse of the Norman lawyers. For, besides the scutages to which they were liable in defect of personal attendance, which however were assessed by themselves in parliament, they might be called upon by the king or lord. paramount for aids, whenever his eldest son was to be knighted, or his eldest daughter married; not to forget the ransom of his own person. The heir, on the death of his ancestor, if of full age, was plundered of the first emoluments arising from his inheritance, by way of relief and primer seisin; and, if under age, of the whole of his estate during infancy. And then, as sir Thomas Smith very feelingly complains, "when he came to his own, after he was out of wardship, his woods decayed, houses fallen down, stock wasted and gone, lands let forth and ploughed to be barren," to reduce him still farther, he was yet to pay half a year's profits as a fine for suing out his livery; and also the price or value of his marriage, if he refused such wife as his lord and guardian had bartered for, and imposed upon him; or twice that value, if he married another