Note 146 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES (continued 3)

The reason doubtless is that they were assessed, as the historians tell us, and as the roll itself shows, not only upon those estates from which services of the shield were explicitly due, but also upon all lands held in chief of the crown, and all church lands without distinction of tenure; the basis of assessment in all cases being the knight's fee, in its secondary sense of a parcel of land worth twenty pounds a year. Whatever the laity might think of this arrangement, the indignation of the clergy was bitter and deep. The wrong inflicted on them by the scutage of 1156 was as nothing compared with this, which set at nought all ancient precedents of ecclesiastical immunity, and actually wrung from the church lands even more than from the lay fiefs.146