The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. Frederic William Maitland

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Название The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I
Автор произведения Frederic William Maitland
Жанр Юриспруденция, право
Серия
Издательство Юриспруденция, право
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781614871774



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in the word serviens, which will stand for servant, and will stand for light armed soldier, may have attracted within the sphere of serjeanty certain tenures which had about them no strong trace of what we have called “servantship.” Still originally the servientes of the army were so called because they were attendants on the milites, whose shields they carried, and whose esquires they were—for the esquire (scutifer, armiger) of those times was one who carried the shield or arms of his lord. Thus by one way or another we come back to the idea of “servantship” as the core of serjeanty.197

      (b) Such cases gradually shade off into others in which a substantial rent has been reserved. We pass through the very numerous instances in which the lord is to receive yearly some small article of luxury, a sparrowhawk, a pair of gloves, a pair of gilt spurs, a pound of pepper or of incense or of wax, to other cases in which [p.272] the rent, if we cannot call it a “rack rent,” is “the best rent that can reasonably be gotten.” We thus enter the sphere of commerce, of rents fixed by supply and demand.

      Such tenures as these may be found in every zone of the territorial system. The tenant may be holding of the king in chief; the king has, as we should say, granted perpetual leases at substantial rents of some of his manors, the lessees being sometimes lay barons, sometimes religious houses.213 Again, from the Conquest onward, to say nothing of an earlier time, very great men have not thought it beneath them to hold church lands at easy rents.214 It is an accusation common in monastic annals that the abbots of the Norman time dissipated the lands of their houses by improvident grants to their foreign kinsmen or by taking fines instead of reserving adequate rents. In such cases these tenants in socage may have other tenants in socage below them, who will pay them heavier rents. Ultimately we come to the actual occupant of the soil, whose rent will in many cases represent the best offer that his landlord could obtain for the land. Occasionally he may be paying more for the land than can be got from the villeins of the same village.

      (c) Sometimes we find in charters of feoffment that the feoffee, besides paying rent, is to do or get done a certain amount of agricultural labour on his lord’s land, so