Note 354 — MAGNA CARTA.

Glanvill’s words (IX. c. 4) are unfortunately ambiguous. He distinguishes three cases: (a) the normal knight’s fee, from which 100s. was due as relief (whether this extends to fees of crown tenants does not appear); (b) socage lands, from which one year’s rent might be taken; and (c) “capitales baroniae,” which were left subject to reliefs at the king’s discretion. Now “barony” was a loose word: baronies, like barons, might be small or great (cf. infra, c. 14); all crown fiefs being “baronies” in one sense, but only certain larger “honours” being so reckoned in another. Glanvill leaves this vital point undetermined, but evidence from other sources makes it probable that even smaller crown holdings should for this purpose be classed under his capitales baroniae, and not with knights’ fees held from mesne lords. Two passages from the Dialogus de Scaccario (II. x. E. p. 135 and II. xxiv. p. 155) clearly support the distinction between all crown tenants (small as well as great) on the one hand, and tenants of mesne lords on the other: only the latter had their reliefs fixed, while the former were at the king’s discretion. (The second passage shows how the exchequer officials held the onus of proof to lie on the heir to a crown fief to show that he was worthy to succeed his father, and suggests rich gifts to the king as the best form of proof.) Madox (I. 315-6) cites from the Pipe Rolls large sums exacted by the crown. Usually the number of knights’ fees paid for is not specified, but in one case a relief of £300 was paid for six fees—that is, at the rate of £50 per fee, or exactly ten times what a mesne lord could have exacted. (See Pipe Roll, 24 Henry II., cited by Madox, ibid.) There is further evidence to the same effect: where a barony had escheated to the crown, reliefs of the former under-tenants would in future be payable directly to the crown; but it was the practice of Henry II. (confirmed by c. 43 of Magna Carta, q. v.) to charge, in such cases, only the lower rates exigible prior to the escheat. A similar rule applied to under-tenants of baronies in wardship; see the case of the knights of the see of Lincoln in the hands of a royal warden in Pipe Roll, 14 Henry II. (cited by Madox, ibid.). It would thus appear that all holders of crown fiefs (not merely barones majores) were in Glanvill’s day still liable to arbitrary extortions in name of reliefs. The editors of the Dialogus (p. 223) are also of this opinion. Pollock and Maitland (I. 289), however, maintain the opposite view—namely, that the limitation to 100s. per knight’s fee was binding on the crown as well as on mesne lords.