edged sword except to a king with a full pocket, as these men knew no principle of loyalty to their employer.

As time went on, other far-reaching effects were produced. While the defence of the English borders was left more and more to the baronial levies and the local militia, operations on the Continent became less fitful, making war more of a game. Philip Augustus does not give back to John at a truce, as his father did to Henry, the territories taken in the campaign, for money or as an exchange. The master of mercenaries could not afford to be idle; he must arrange for a prolonged campaign, and must manage that his paid levies should live upon the country in which they fought, and that he had money in hand with which to pay them.

Henry fought two wars, in 1173-74 and 1188-89, against an alliance of the revolted baronage in England, backed by his own sons and the king of France, and in 1173-74 the king of Scotland. In the first of these he won against very great odds because he had 20,000 Brabant mercenaries in his pay on the Continent, and had the money wherewith to pay them. In the second he went down in the dust, because, trusting in the professions of his son Richard, and looking forward to peace, he economised by disbanding his mercenaries, and committed great part of his treasure to this son, who turned traitor. This enabled Richard and Philip of France to employ Henry's mercenaries against him, and to pay them with the money which his son had stolen from his father.

Richard, who, unlike his father, sought opportunities for war and quarrel, spent his life as a leader of continental mercenaries, using England merely as a bank from which to draw their pay. John, says Richard of Devizes, in 1193 hired numbers of Welsh mercenaries to forward his attempts against Richard, and Gervase tells us that they were left quartered near Reading without food or pay, and plundered the country around for a living.

If Richard had continued to develop Henry's system of government, the Crown might have maintained its power through the changing conditions of society. But in this, as in everything else, his expedition to Palestine threw to the winds all Henry's system.

John, at his accession, with an empty exchequer, met great feudal landowners, bitterly discontented, clamouring for sua jura, and in many cases heavily indebted to the Crown.13 They had been ousted from civil authority in England in favour of a class of men bred for official duties, men with smaller landed possessions and less local authority, and had been supplanted by mercenaries for warfare on the Continent by Henry. They had then been left to fight among themselves under Richard, except where he had led them personally to war abroad. On these men John, a bankrupt king, was compelled to rely for all operations at home or abroad, except so far as he could wring from the abbeys or the Jews or from the use of the courts money with which to pay his Poitou mercenaries. The barons sulked and refused to follow him either to Normandy or Anjou. It is hardly surprising that he was unpopular with the monks.

It is difficult to see what was the advantage to the great baron of this change to scutage. He might very likely collect from his tenants, especially if he were sheriff, a good deal more money than ever found its way into the king's exchequer. Apart from this, unless he had a war of his own on hand with a neighbour, he himself followed the king in many cases with his personal retainers for prestige and plunder, acting as contractor for the services of such of his tenants as wished to go to the war.

A certain proportion of the barons gradually settled down as great farmers and stock-raisers, paying personal attention to their vast estates. But the baron, unless he followed the king, found himself gradually deprived of the usual occupation of war for his followers, whose pockets he touched every time he satisfied the king's demand for feudal service. It is not surprising that he in his turn watched his opportunity to take advantage of the difficulties of his feudal superior, with the result that from the end of John's reign to the accession of Henry VII., England was the scene of recurring civil wars between the king and his barons about money, of which the commercial classes who had the money gained the advantage always open to spectators with hard cash. The imposition of scutage gave them their right to decide matters of taxation.

The National Militia.-As the third line for national defence or for border warfare in that part of the Islands which was subject to the feudal system, the heads of the families of the whole people were called into the field as the "fyrd" or national militia, each man having to provide himself with some sort of arms.14 By the Assize of Arms (1181) the whole free population was to arm for defence, descending to those who possessed ten marks in chattels, including all burghers and freemen. This national militia, the parish priest with all his parishioners capable of fighting, formed a great part of the force at the battle of the Standard, and were largely responsible for putting down the insurrection of 1173. This was really the old levy of the tribes by families. Very naturally there gradually came about a division of social status between the swagger feudal soldier of the first line, who takes money as a mercenary, and the home-staying freeman of the farming class serving in the fyrd. The one becomes a knight or squire, the other sinks to be a villein.

NOTES. This does not mean that England had departed altogether from communal custom. Far from it. But by the influence of agriculture, the dominance of the Roman Church, and commerce with the Continent, the custom was overlaid and hidden by feudal law. 2 It would appear from various provisions of the Tres Ancien Coutumier de Normandie that, apart from military purposes, the customs of the communal society held in most social relationships and coloured all the administration of the law. 3 The Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond. An account of the Abbey of St Edmundsbury in the twelfth to the thirteenth century. A good edition is in the King's Classics, edited by Professor Gollancz. 4 A.L.W., Ven. II. xix. 7. 5 A.L. Irel., i. 159, 161, 189. 6 A.L. Irel., iv. 133. 7 A.L. Irel., iii. 495. 8 A.L.W., Ven. II. xix. 8. 9 Coke (Reports, part vii. p. 59) reported Sir Miles Corbet's case in 27 Eliz., where a claim for common, locally called shack, was made for the beasts of the neighbourhood after harvest on land in Norfolk which had long become possessed in severalty and was enclosed. The like intercommoning, says a note to the case, is in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and other counties; and in Mich. term 18 Chas. II., B. R. Twisden Justice said that this common called shack was but common per cause de vicinage. But it was a case, says Coke, I thought fit to be reported, because it is a general case in the said county, and at first the Court was altogether ignorant of the nature of this common called shack. 10 Even so late as the year 1745-46, when the Chevalier Charles Edward, by way of making an example, caused a soldier to be shot for desertion, the Highlanders, who composed his army, were affected as much by indignation as by

fear. They could not conceive any principle of justice upon which a man's life could be taken for merely going home when it did not suit him to remain longer with the army. Such had been the uniform practice of their fathers. When a battle was over the campaign was in their opinion ended; if it was lost they sought safety in their mountains; if won they returned there to secure their booty. At other times they had their cattle to look after and their harvests to sow or reap, without which their families would have perished for want. In either case there was an end of their services for the time; and though they were easily enough recalled by the prospect of fresh adventures and more plunder, yet the opportunity of success was in the meantime lost and could not afterwards be recovered. 11 See as to Continental feudalism in Scotland and Ireland, infra, Chapters XXVII., XXVIII. In 1649 the English army were mutinous at being ordered to Ireland, denying the right of the Government to send them beyond seas. The officers, failing to satisfy them by a "solemn seeking of God by prayer," cast lots as to which regiment was to go. This was no more successful; the men were still mutinous. 12 The period of knight service was forty days. The tribal levies do not seem to have been bound by any definite period of time, it being assumed, I suppose, that when the plunder was exhausted the men would go home. 13 Geoffrey of Mandeville was indebted to the king in 19,000; Egidius, Bishop of Hereford, in 9000 marks. Geoffrey of Mandeville and Eustace de Vesci, says Walter of Coventry, pro parte magna causam dederunt hujus tumultus regis Angliæ." Giraldus (De Instructione) asserts that where, Edward the Confessor had 60,000 marks of revenue, Henry II. had only 12,000, because Stephen and others had given away so much. Henry and his sons, he says, trusted to contingencies. 14 See ordinance of 14 Hen. III., Close Rolls Membrane 5 d., and other authorities quoted by Professor Vinogradoff in English Society in the Eleventh Century.

CHAPTER VI

THE CONTRAST OF THE COMMUNAL SOCIETY

As we quit England, and Scotland south and east of the Grampians, largely peopled permanently by Saxons and Normans, in which, owing to the English marriages of the descendants of Malcolm and St Margaret, the feudal system had begun early to drive out the social community, we leave behind us this later system of military obligation and the resulting individual tenure of land from military chiefs.

We

return, whether in Wales, Man, Ireland, Northern or Western Scotland, and the adjoining Islands (even in some measure in the northern counties of England) to a condition of society in many respects very like to Tacitus' description of the dwellers in the German forests. Some of the main features which accompanied feudal land-holding, the increase of federal authority, the more military organisation of society, the decay of popular assemblies and of popular courts, the increasing practice of commendation to obtain protection, may be seen here as a development natural on increase of population, on military necessity, and on the steadily advancing influence of Roman ideas. But we must take especial note of some deepseated agencies of difference then existing between England, even South-Eastern England, and the rest of the Islandsdifferences which have divided off Henry's dominions from the other lands, which have not wholly, I think, lost their influence to-day.

Common Ownership of the Soil.-The so-called Englishman of the twelfth century, Saxon, Norman, Flemish or Angevin, recognised as the primary tie between man and man, both social and political, the holding or tenure of land by one individual from another as a partial temporary ownership, an estate in land, or a tenancy of land for services to be rendered to or for the individual owner, mostly military services, the actual residuary ownership of all the soil resting eventually on the king as chief military lord of the nation. The rest of the people in the Islands recognised as such primary tie, in the first instance, a common ownership of the soil by all persons within a certain circle, the tribe, the sept, or the family, only alienable to a very limited extent beyond that circle. How wide the circle, how complete the communal ownership, depended according to my views almost entirely on geographical and economic causes: the extent of land available for cultivation, the convenience to large rivers and to the sea, the mountain ranges, the moisture, the nearness to markets and trade routes; the only influence, apart from these natural causes, which defined or modified the form of the communal society was that of Rome, the great corn-grower and exponent of feudal authority.1