These were the principal and very simple qualities of the genuine or original feuds, being then all of a military nature, and in the hands of mili. tary persons; though the feudatories, being under frequent incapacities of cultivating and manuring their own lands, soon found it necessary to commit part of them to inferior tenants, obliging them to such returns in service, corn, cattle, or money, as might enable the chief feudatories to attend their military duties without distraction; which returns, or reditus, were the original of rents. And by this means the feudal polity was greatly extended; these inferior feudatories (who held what are called in Scots law, "rere-feifs ") being under similar obligations of fealty, to do suit of court, to answer the stipulated renders or rent service, and to promote the welfare of their immediate superiors or lords. But this at the same time demolished the ancient simplicity of feuds ; and an inroad being once made upon their constitution, it subjected them in course of time to great varieties and innovations. Feuds came to be bought and sold, and other deviations were made from the old fundamental rules of tenure and succession, which were held no longer sacred, when the feuds themselves no longer continued to be purely military.

But as soon as the feudal system came to be considered in the light of a civil establishment rather than as a military plan, the ingenuity of the same ages, which perplexed all theology with the subtility of scholastic disquisitions, and bewildered philosophy in the mazes of metaphysical jargon, began also to exert its influence on this copious and fruitful subject; in pursuance of which the most refined and oppressive consequences were drawn from what originally was a plan of simplicity and liberty, equally beneficial both to the lord and tenant, and prudently calculated for their mutual protection and defence.

In England there seems to have subsisted four principal species of lay ten. ures, to which all others may be reduced; the grand criterion of which were, the natures of the several services or renders, that were due to the lords from their tenants. The services in respect of their quality were either free or buse services, in respect of their quantity and the time of exacting them were either certain or uncertain. Free services were such as were not unbecoming the character of a soldier or a freeman to perform, as to serve under his lord in the wars, to pay a sum of money, and the like. Base services were such as were fit only for peasants, or persons of a servile rank, as to plough his lord's land, to make his hedges, to carry out his dung, or other mean employments. The certain services, whether free or base, were such as were stinted in quantity, and could not be exceeded on any pretence; as to pay stated annual rent, or to plough such a field for three days. The uncertain depended upon unknown contingencies; as to do military service in person, or to pay an assessment in lieu of it, when called upon, or to wind a horn whenever the Scots invaded the realm

of England, which were free services, or to do whatever the lord should command, which was a base or villein service.

Forty days was the term generally settled as the measure of military service, during which time the tenant of a knight's fee was bound to be in the field at his own expense. But the length of service diminished with the quantity of land: for half a knight's fee, but twenty days of service in the field were due; for an eighth part, but five days; and when this was commuted for an escuage or pecuniary assessment, the same proportion was observed. Men turned of sixty, public magistrates, and women of course, were free from personal service, but obliged to send substitutes. A failure in this primary duty incurred perhaps strictly a forfeiture of the fief; but it was usual for the lord to amerce such vassals, which was called an escuage. The Highland Clans followed their chief into the field, and likewise the Irish, but their tie was the double one of relationship as well as vassalage. The chieftain exercising the original patriarchal government over his descendents, and followers. The feudal system did not exist till after the conquest; and the kings of Scotland borrowed it, as they did many other institutions, from England.

FRANKALMOIGN was a tenure peculiar to the clergy, and Lord Coke says, "no lay person can hold in frankalmoign;" and according to Lyttleton, on whom he comments, a tenant in frankalmoign is “where an abbot or prior, or other man of religion, or of holy church, holdeth of his lord in free alms.” The same author says that the service required by this species of tenure was, " that they which hold in frankalmoign are bound before God to make orisons, prayers, masses, and other divine services for the souls of their granters or feoffers, and for the souls of their heirs which were dead, and for the prosperity and good life and good health of their heirs which are alive. And therefore they shall do no fealty to their lord, because that this divine service is better for them before God than any doing of fealty, and also because the words frank almoign exclude an earthly or temporal service." Under the Saxon monarchy, all the bishops of England, and such abbots and priors as held their lands of the crown, held by this tenure. The change of those estates into baronies, subject to homage and fealty, and held of the king by knight service, was an important alteration, made by William I., in the English constitution. But it was not understood that religious persons were bound by this change, to perform military service like temporal barons. They were either to find other men to do the duty for them, or to compound for their service by fines to our sovereign lord the king. It would have been indecent and inconsistent with their sacred calling, to have obliged ecclesiastics to bear arms, and therefore, in accordance with the wisdom and decorum of the law, they were put upon the same footing as women possessed of knights' fees. But there was no impropriety in their being required to find

the king, of whom they held their baronies, either soldiers or money in lieu of their personal services.

SOCCAGE. Sir T. Lyttleton says, that every tenure which is not tenure in chivalry, is a tenure in soccage; and that a tenure in soccage is where the tenant holdeth of his lord the tenancy by certain service, for all manner of services. Sir H. Spelman observes, from the ancient book of St Albans, that socmen (or tenants in soccage) signified freeman in the genuine sense of the word. All the king's tenants in ancient demesne held of him by soccage tenure; in some points it appears that they had more liberty than the military tenants, that is, the feudal bonds were less strict on them and their families, though the tenants by knights' service was the higher and more honourable service. In Doomsday- Book, they are distinguished from other free tenants, by the denomination of liberi homines, not having the power which the knight-service tenants possessed, of giving away or selling their estates, without permission from their lords. It seems that these liberi homines were a remainder of the allodial tenants of the Saxon folkland, that is, land of the vulgar, as opposed to bocland, or thanelandA certain number of them was necessary to constitute a manor, and therefore when that number was incomplete, some who held in villeinage were enfranchised, to make it up. Sometimes those who were in possession of this allodial freedom, found it necessary to seek a defence and protection, by placing themselves under the protection of some feudal lord, or even of two lords, if the situation of their lands made it necessary for them to have two protectors. It is probable, that this practice becoming more general, in process of time, put an end to this species of tenure. Their real services to the lord of the manor in their allodial state, were predial and rustic. A certain number of free socmen (as well as these) appears to have been necessary to every lord of a manor, for holding the pleas of the manor court, which the Saxons called soke or soc, a word signifying a franchise, or jurisdiction to which a franchise was annexed. And it is evidently from this that the words socmen and soccage were derived. Some of the lands held in soccage were held by base services, and at the will of the lords, but the definition given of it by Lyttleton, and other great authorities, excludes from it all tenures where the service was uncertain. Among the legantine canons made at London by the bishop of Winchester, in the reign of king Stephen, Lord Lyttleton produces one which says, "that the plough and husbandmen in the fields should enjoy the same peace as if they were in the churchyard." This sanctuary given to the cultivators of the soil on their own grounds, might, if duly regarded, have been of immense benefit to the people. But unfortunately, the civil wars which so often scourged the kingdom, paid little respect to either spiritual or temporal laws. According to Lyt tleton, burgage tenure was one kind of soccage, but with various customs. The statute of the 12th of Charles II. entirely changed this constitution

of property: it declared "that all tenures by knights' service of the king, or of any other person, and by knights' service in capite, and by soccage in capite of the king, and the fruits and consequences thereof, shall be taken away or discharged, and that all tenures of any honours, manors, lands, tenements, hereditaments, &c. are turned into free and common soccage:" Thus, says my Lord Lyttleton in his history of the life and reign of Henry II. "extending that tenure, which, for several ages, was reckoned comparatively mean and ignoble, to all estates of our nobility and gentry, who would have anciently thought it the greatest injury and dishonour to have had their possessions so levelled with those of the vulgar. Yet to this change, which a gradual alteration of manners and juster notions of government had prepared us to receive, is owing much of the happiness of our present condition. But, at the same time, it has obliged us to seek for other methods of giving a military strength to the kingdom consistent with our monarchy, and not dangerous to our freedom: a matter of no little difficulty, but which, if brought to perfection, would secure and perpetuate the advantages, which we have over our ancestors, in the civil policy of the kingdom."

VILLEINS. In Doomsday-Book, a distinction is made between villeins who were affixed to a manor, and others of a still lower and more servile condition, distinguished by the names of bordarii, cotarii, and servi; the two first of which seem to have rented small portions of land, and the last to have been hinds, or menial servants, residing in the families of their lords. If a free woman was married to a villein by birth, she lost her freedom during the life of her husband, and the children of such marriage became also slaves, and which state of servitude continued to all succeeding generations, unless their lord enfranchised them by his own act. Glanville says,

that in his time, if a freeman married a woman born in villeinage, and who actually lived in that state, he thereby lost the benefit of the law, (that is, all the legal rights of a freeman,) and was considered as a villein by birth, during the lifetime of his wife, on account of her villeinage. And that if a man, born in villeinage, had children by a woman born in the same state, under a different lord, the children ought to be equally divided between the two lords. This is absolutely putting children on the same foot as cattle, and is more unnatural than our present laws of slavery in the West India Colonies, where in such a case as that now mentioned, the children are always esteemed, without challenge, the property of the mother's lord.

There were several methods of enfranchising villeins. If his lord, being willing to give him his freedom, had proclaimed him free from all right that he or his heirs might have to him, or had given or sold him to another, for the purpose of being enfranchised. But according to Glanville, no villein could purchase his freedom with his own money, because all the goods belonging to a villein born belonged to his lord, and therefore he

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could not redeem himself with his master's money; but he might with the money of another man. In this respect also our negro slaves have an advantage over the old English slaves, for their property is absolutely their own, and guaranteed to them by the colonial laws. The same author says, "that if a villein born had remained quietly, (that is, unclaimed by his lord,) a year and a day, in any privileged town; so that he had been received into their community or gyld, as a citizen, he was thereby freed from his villeinage." A privileged town is one that had franchises by prescription or charter. According to lord chief justice Bracton, a quiet residence of a year and a day, on the king's demesne lands, would also enfranchise a villein who had fled from his lord. There is a law of William the Conqueror, where it is enacted, "that if any one is willing to free his slave, let him deliver him by his right hand to the sheriff, in full county court, and proclaim him discharged by manumission, from the yoke of his servitude; and let him show him the doors open and his way free, and put into his hands the arms of a free man, namely a lance and a sword, which being done, he is made a freeman." Bracton relates, that the lives and limbs of slaves were under the king's protection, so that if a lord killed his slave, he should suffer the same punishment as if he had killed any other person. The chastity of female slaves was likewise protected from all violence by the laws of those times, and the goods of villeins were secured against all others, except their lords.

HOMAGE. Homage was done by the vassal on his knees, unarmed and bareheaded, and holding both his hands between those of his lord, who was sitting which ceremonies denoted, (according to Bracton,) on the part of the lord, protection, defence, and warranty; on the part of the tenant, reverence and subjection. In a statute of 17 Edward II., there is a set form of words to be used by the vassal, where homage was done to a subject. Kneeling before his lord, as before related, he was to say, "I become your man from this day forward, of life, limb, and earthly honour; I will be true and faithful to you, and bear to you faith for the lands I hold of you, saving my faith to our lord the king and his heirs." After repeating these words, the lord kissed the vassal, who then rose up and took the oath of fealty as follows: "Hear this, my lord, that I will be faithful and loyal to you, and will bear to you faith for the tenements which I hold of you, and loyally will perform to you the customs and services which I owe to you, at the terms assigned, so help me God and his saints."

Homage done to the king was called leige homage, and was accompanied with the oath of allegiance expressed in these words; "I become your liege man, of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and troth I shall bear unto you, to live and die against all manner of folk, so help me God." The ceremony was precisely the same otherwise, as in doing homage to a mesne lord. In the year 1039, Anselm, on being promoted to the see of Can