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$Title{History Of Europe During The Middle Ages
Part VI}
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$Author{Hallam, Henry}
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Title:       History Of Europe During The Middle Ages
Book:        Book VIII: The Constitutional History Of England
Author:      Hallam, Henry

Part VI

     Besides the severities exercised upon the English after every
insurrection, two instances of William's unsparing cruelty are well known,
know, the devastation of Yorkshire and of the New Forest.  In the former,
which had the tyrant's plea, necessity, for its pretext, an invasion being
threatened from Denmanrk, the whole country between the Tyne and the Humber
was laid so desolate, that for nine years afterwards there was not an
inhabited village, and hardly an inhabitant, left; the wasting of this
district having been followed by a famine, which swept away the whole
population. ^q That of the New Forest, though undoubtedly less calamitous in
its effects, seems even more monstrous from the frivolousness of the cause. ^r
He afforested several other tracts.  And these favorite desmesnes of the
Norman kings were protected by a system of iniquitous and cruel regulations,
called the Forest Laws, which it became afterwards a great object with the
asserters of liberty to correct.  The penalty for killing a stag or a boar was
loss of eyes; for William loved the great game, says the Saxon Chronicle, as
if he had been their father. ^s

[Footnote q: Malmesbury, p. 103; Hoveden, p. 451; Orderic. Vitalis, p. 514.
The desolation of Yorkshire continued in Malmesbury's time, sixty or seventy
years afterwards; nudum omnium solum usque ad hoc etiam tempus.]

[Footnote r: Malmesbury, p. 111.]

[Footnote s: Chron. Saxon., p. 191.  M. Thierry conjectures that these severe
regulations had a deeper motive than the mere preservation of game, and were
intended to prevent the English from assembling in arms on pretence of the
chase.  Vol. ii. p. 257.  But perhaps this is not necessary.  We know that a
disproportionate severity has often guarded the beasts and birds of chase from
depredation.

     Allen admits (Edinburgh Rev., xxvi. 355) that the forest laws seem to
have been enacted by the king's sole authority; or, as we may rather say, that
they were considered as a part of his prerogative.  The royal forests were
protected by extraordinary penalties even before the conquest.  "The royal
forests were part of the demesne of the crown.  They were not included in the
territorial divisions of the kingdom, civil or ecclesiastical, nor governed by
the ordinary courts of law, but were set apart for the recreation and
diversion of the king, as waste lands, which he might use and dispose of at
pleasure." "Forestae," says Sir Henry Spelman, "nec villas proprie accepere,
nec parochias, nec de corpore alicujus comitatus vel episcopatus habitae sunt,
sed extraneum quiddam et feris datum, ferino jure, non civili, non municipali
fruebantur; regem in omnibus agnoscentes dominum unicum et ex arbitrio
disponentem." Mr. Allen quotes afterwards a passage from the "Dialogus de
Scaccario," which indicates the peculiarity of the forest-laws.  "Forestarum
ratio, poena quoque vel absolutio delinquentium in eas, sive pecuniaria fuerit
sive corporalis, seorsim ab aliis regni judiciis secernitur, et solius regis
arbitrio, vel cujuslibet familiaris ad hoc specialiter deputati subjicitur.
Legibus quidem propriis subsistit; quas non communi regni jure, sed voluntaria
principum institutione subnixas dicunt." The forests were, to use a word in
rather an opposite sense to the usual, an oasis of despotism in the midst of
the old common law.]

     A more general proof of the ruinous oppression of William the Conqueror
may be deduced from the comparative condition of the English towns in the
reign of Edward the Confessor, and at the compilation of Domesday.  At the
former epoch there were in York 1,607 inhabited houses, at the latter 967; at
the former there were in Oxford 721, at the latter 243; of 172 houses in
Dorchester, 100 were destroyed; of 243 in Derby, 103; of 487 in Chester, 205.
Some other towns had suffered less, but scarcely any one fails to exhibit
marks of a decayed population.  As to the relative numbers of the peasantry
and value of lands at these two periods, it would not be easy to assert
anything without laborious examination of Domesday Book. ^t

[Footnote t: The population recorded in Domesday is about 283,000, which, in
round numbers, allowing for women and children, may be called about a million.
Ellis' Introduction to Domesday, vol. ii. p. 288.]

     The demesne lands of the crown, extensive and scattered over every
county, were abundantly sufficient to support its dignity and magnificence; ^u
and William, far from wasting this revenue by prodigal grants, took care to
let them at the highest rate to farm, little caring how much the cultivators
were racked by his tenants. ^v Yet his exactions, both feudal and in the way
of tallage from his burgesses and the tenants of his vassals, were almost as
violent as his confiscations.  No source of income was neglected by him, or
indeed by his successors, however trifling, unjust, or unreasonable.  His
revenues, if we could trust Ordericus Vitalis, amounted to 1,060l. a day.
This, in mere weight of silver, would be equal to nearly 1,200,000l. a year at
present.  But the arithmetical statements of these writers are not implicitly
to be relied upon.  He left at his death a treasure of 60,000l, which, in
conformity to his dying request, his successor distributed among the church
and poor of the kingdom, as a feeble expiation of the crimes by which it had
been accumulated; ^w an act of disinterestedness which seems to prove that
Rufus, amidst all his vices, was not destitute of better feelings than
historians have ascribed to him.  It might appear that William had little use
for his extorted wealth.  By the feudal constitution, as established during
his reign, he commanded the service of a vast army at its own expense, either
for domestic or continental warfare.  But this was not sufficient for his
purpose; like other tyrants, he put greater trust in mercenary obedience.
Some of his predecessors had kept bodies of Danish troops in pay; partly to be
secure against their hostility, partly from the convenience of a regular army,
and the love which princes bear to it. But William carried this to a much
greater length.  He had always stipendiary soldiers at his command.  Indeed
his army at the Conquest could not have been swollen to such numbers by any
other means.  They were drawn, by the allurement of high pay, not from France
and Brittany alone, but Flanders, Germany, and even Spain.  When Canute of
Denmark threatened an invasion in 1085, William, too conscious of his own
tyranny to use the arms of his English subjects, collected a mercenary force
so vast, that men wondered, says the Saxon chronicler, how the country could
maintain it.  This he quartered upon the people, according to the proportion
of their estates. ^x

[Footnote u: They consisted of 1,422 manors.  Lyttelton's Henry II., vol. ii.
p. 288.]

[Footnote v: Chron. Saxon., p. 188.]

[Footnote w: Huntingdon, p. 371.  Ordericus Vitalis puts a long penitential
speech into William's mouth on his death-bed. p. 66.  Though this may be his
invention, yet facts seem to show the compunction of the tyrant's conscience.]

[Footnote x: Chron. Saxon., p. 185; Ingulfus, p. 79.]

     Whatever may be thought of the Anglo-Saxon tenures, it is certain that
those of the feudal system were thoroughly established in England under the
Conqueror.  It has been observed, in another part of this work, that the
rights, or feudal incidents, of wardship and marriage were more common in
England and Normandy than in the rest of France.  They certainly did not exist
in the former before the Conquest; but whether they were ancient customs of
the latter cannot be ascertained, unless we had more incontestable records of
its early jurisprudence.  For the Great Customary of Normandy is a compilation
as late as the reign of Richard Coeurde-Lion, when the laws of England might
have passed into a country so long and intimately connected with it.  But
there appears reason to think that the seizure of the lands in wardship, the
selling of the heiress in marriage, were originally deemed rather acts of
violence than conformable to law. For Henry I.'s charter expressly promises
that the mother, or next of kin, shall have the custody of the lands as well
as person of the heir. ^y And as the charter of Henry II. refers to and
confirms that of his grandfather, it seems to follow that what is called
guardianship in chivalry had not yet been established.  At least it is not
till the assize of Clarendon, confirmed at Northampton in 1176, ^z that the
custody of the heir is clearly reserved to the lord.  With respect to the
right of consenting to the marriage of a female vassal, it seems to have been,
as I have elsewhere observed, pretty general in feudal tenures.  But the sale
of her person in marriage, or the exaction of a sum of money in lieu of this
scandalous tyranny, was only the law of England, and was not perhaps fully
authorized as such till the statute of Merton in 1236.

[Footnote y: Terrae et liberorum custos erit sive uxor, sive alius
propinquorum, qui justus esse debebit; et praecipio ut barones mei similiter
se contineant erga filios vel filias vel uxores hominum metrum. Leges
Anglo-Saxonicae, p. 234.]

[Footnote z: Ibid., p. 330.]

     One innovation made by William upon the feudal law is very deserving of
attention.  By the leading principle of feuds, an oath of fealty was due from
the vassal to the lord of whom he immediately held his land, and to no other.
The king of France, long after this period, had no feudal and scarcely any
royal authority over the tenants of his own vassals.  But William received at
Salisbury, in 1085, the fealty of all landholders in England, both those who
held in chief, and their tenants; ^a thus breaking in upon the feudal compact
in its most essential attribute, the exclusive dependence of a vassal upon his
lord.  And this may be reckoned among the several causes which prevented the
continental notions of independence upon the crown from ever taking root among
the English aristocracy.

[Footnote a: Chron.  Saxon., p. 187.  The oath of allegiance or fealty, for
they were in spirit the same, had been due to the king before the conquest; we
find it among the laws of Edmund.  Allen's Inquiry, p. 68. It was not,
therefore, likely that William would surrender such a tie upon his subjects.
But it had also been usual in France under Charlemagne, and perhaps later.]

     The best measure of William was the establishment of public peace. He
permitted no rapine but his own.  The feuds of private revenge, the
lawlessness of robbery, were repressed.  A girl laden with gold, if we believe
some ancient writers, might have passed safely through the kingdom. ^b But
this was the tranquillity of an imperious and vigilant despotism, the degree
of which may be measured by these effects, in which no improvement of
civilization had any share.  There is assuredly nothing to wonder at in the
detestation with which the English long regarded the memory of this tyrant. ^c
Some advantages undoubtedly, in the course of human affairs, eventually sprang
from the Norman conquest.  The invaders, though without perhaps any intrinsic
superiority in social virtues over the native English, degraded and barbarous
as these are represented to us, had at least their exterior polish of
courteous and chivalric manners, and that taste for refinement and
magnificence, which serve to elevate a people from mere savage rudeness.
Their buildings, sacred as well as domestic, became more substantial and
elegant.  The learning of the clergy, the only class to whom that word could
at all be applicable, became infinitely more respectable in a short time after
the conquest. And though this may be by some ascribed to the general
improvements of Europe in that point during the twelfth century, yet I think
it was partly owing to the more free intercourse with France, and the closer
dependence upon Rome, which that revolution produced.  This circumstance was,
however, of no great moment to the English of those times, whose happiness
could hardly be effected by the theological reputation of Lanfranc and Anselm.
Perhaps the chief benefit which the natives of that generation derived from
the government of William and his successors, next to that of a more vigilant
police was the security they found from invasion on the side of Denmark and
Norway.  The high reputation of the Conqueror and his sons, with the regular
organization of a feudal militia, deterred those predatory armies which had
brought such repeated calamity on England in former times.

[Footnote b: Chron. Saxon., p. 190; M. Paris, p. 10.  I will not omit one
other circumstance, apparently praiseworthy, which Odericus mentions of
William, that he tried to learn English, in order to render justice by
understanding every man's complaint, but failed on account of his advanced
age.  P. 520.  This was in the early part of his reign, before the reluctance
of the English to submit had exasperated his disposition.]

[Footnote c: W. Malmsb. Praef. ad. l. iii.]

     The system of feudal policy, though derived to England from a French
source, bore a very different appearance in the two countries.  France, for
about two centuries after the house of Capet had usurped the throne of
Charlemagne's posterity, could hardly be deemed a regular confederacy, much
less an entire monarchy.  But in England a government, feudal indeed in its
form, but arbitrary in its exercise, not only maintained subordination, but
almost extinguished liberty.  Several causes seem to have conspired towards
this radical difference.  In the first place, a kingdom comparatively small is
much more easily kept under control than one of vast extent.  And the fiefs of
Anglo-Norman barons after the Conquest were far less considerable, even
relatively to the size of the two countries, than those of France.  The Earl
of Chester held, indeed, almost all that county; ^d the Earl of Shrewsbury,
nearly the whole of Salop.  But these domains bore no comparison with the
dukedom of Guienne, or the county of Toulouse.  In general, the lordships of
William's barons, whether this were owing to policy or accident, were
exceedingly dispersed. Robert Earl of Moreton, for example, the most richly
endowed of his followers, enjoyed 248 manors in Cornwall, 54 in Sussex, 196 in
Yorkshire, 99 in Northamptonshire, besides many in other countries. ^e Estates
so disjoined, however immense in their aggregate, were ill calculated for
supporting a rebellion.  It is observed by Madox that the knight's fees of
almost every barony were scattered over various counties.

[Footnote d: This was, upon the whole, more like a great French fief than any
English earldom.  Hugh de Abrincis, nephew of William I., had barons of his
own, one of whom held forty-six and another thirty manors.  Chester was first
called a county-palatine under Henry II.; but it previously possessed all
regalian rights of jurisdiction.  After the forfeitures of the house of
Montgomery, it acquired all the country between the Mersey and Ribble.
Several eminent men inherited the earldom; but upon the death of the most
distinguished, Ranulf, in 1232, it fell into a female line, and soon escheated
to the crown.  Dugdale's Baronage, p. 45.  Lyttelton's Henry II., vol. ii. p.
218.]

[Footnote e: Dugdale's Baronage, p. 25.]

     In the next place, these baronial fiefs were held under an actual
derivation from the crown.  The great vassals of France had usurped their
dominions before the accession of Hugh Capet, and barely submitted to his
nominal sovereignty.  They never intended to yield the feudal tributes of
relief and aid, nor did some of them even acknowledge the supremacy of his
royal jurisdiction.  But the Conqueror and his successors imposed what
conditions they would upon a set of barons who owed all to their grants; and
as mankind's notions of right are generally founded upon prescription, these
peers grew accustomed to endure many burdens, reluctantly indeed, but without
that feeling of injury which would have resisted an attempt to impose them
upon the vassals of the French crown.  For the same reasons the barons of
England were regularly summoned to the great council, and by their attendance
in it, and concurrence in the measures which were there resolved upon, a
compactness and unity of interest was given to the monarchy which was entirely
wanting in that of France.

     We may add to the circumstances that rendered the crown powerful during
the first century after the conquest, an extreme antipathy of the native
English towards their invaders.  Both William Rufus and Henry I. made use of
the former to strengthen themselves against the attempts of their brother
Robert; though they forgot their promises to the English after attaining their
object. ^f A fact mentioned by Ordericus Vitalis illustrates the advantage
which the government found in this national animosity.  During the siege of
Bridgenorth, a town belonging to Robert de Belesme, one of the most turbulent
and powerful of the Norman barons, by Henry I. in 1102, the rest of the
nobility deliberated together, and came to the conclusion that if the king
could expel so distinguished a subject, he would be able to treat them all as
his servants.  They endeavored therefore to bring about a treaty; but the
English part of Henry's army, hating Robert de Belesme as a Norman, urged the
king to proceed with the siege; which he did, and took the castle. ^g

[Footnote f: W. Malmesbury, pp. 120 et 156.  R. Hoveden, p. 461.  Chron.
Saxon., p. 194.]

[Footnote g: Du Chesne, Script.  Norman., p. 807.]

     Unrestrained, therefore, comparatively speaking, by the aristocratic
principles which influenced other feudal countries, the administration
acquired a tone of rigor and arbitrariness under William the Conqueror, which,
though sometimes perhaps a little mitigated, did not cease during a century
and a half.  For the first three reigns we must have recourse to historians;
whose language, though vague, and perhaps exaggerated, is too uniform and
impressive to leave a doubt of the tyrannical character of the government.
The intolerable exactions of tribute, the rapine of purveyance, the iniquity
of royal courts, are continually in their mouths. "God sees the wretched
people," says the Saxon Chronicler, "most unjustly oppressed; first they are
despoiled of their possessions, then butchered. This was a grievous year
(1124).  Whoever had any property lost it by heavy taxes and unjust decrees."
^h The same ancient chronicle, which appears to have been continued from time
to time in the abbey of Peterborough, frequently utters similar notes of
lamentation.

[Footnote h: Chron.  Saxon., p. 228.  Non facile potest narrari miseria, says
Roger de Hoveden, quam sustinuit illo tempore [circ. ann. 1103] terra Anglorum
propter regias exactiones.  P. 470.]

     From the reign of Stephen, the miseries of which are not to my immediate
purpose, so far as they proceeded from anarchy and intestine war, ^i we are
able to trace the character of government by existing records. ^j These,
digested by the industrious Madox into his History of the Exchequer, gives us
far more insight into the spirit of the constitution, if we may use such a
word, than all our monkish chronicles. It was not a sanguinary despotism.
Henry II.  was a prince of remarkable clemency; and none of the Conqueror's
successors were as grossly tyrannical as himself.  But the system of rapacious
extortion from their subjects prevailed to a degree which we should rather
expect to find among eastern slaves than that high-spirited race of Normandy
whose renown then filled Europe and Asia.  The right of wardship was abused by
selling the heir and his land to the highest bidder.  That of marriage was
carried to a still grosser excess.  The kings of France indeed claimed the
prerogative of forbidding the marriage of their vassals' daughters to such
persons as they thought unfriendly or dangerous to themselves; but I am not
aware that they ever compelled them to marry, much less that they turned this
attribute of sovereignty into a means of revenue.  But in England, women and
even men, simply as tenants in chief, and not as wards, fined to the crown for
leave to marry whom they would, or not to be compelled to marry any other. ^k
Towns not only fined for original grants of franchises, but for repeated
confirmations.  The Jews paid exorbitant sums for every common right of
mankind, for protection, for justice.  In return they were sustained against
their Christian debtors in demands of usury, which superstition and tyranny
rendered enormous. ^l Men fined for the king's good-will; or that he would
remit his anger; or to have his mediation with their adversaries.  Many fines
seem as it were imposed in sport, if we look to the cause; though their
extent, and the solemnity with which they were recorded, prove the humor to
have been differently relished by the two parties.  Thus the bishop of
Winchester paid a tun of good wine for not reminding the king (John) to give a
girdle to the Countess of Albemarle; and Robert de Vaux five best palfreys,
that the same king might hold his peace about Henry Pinel's wife.  Another
paid four marks for leave to eat (pro licentia comedendi).  But of all the
abuses which deformed the Anglo-Norman government, none was so flagitious as
the sale of judicial redress.  The king, we are often told, is the fountain of
justice; but in those ages it was one which gold alone could unseal.  Men
fined to have right done them; to sue in a certain court; to implead a certain
person; to have restitution of land which they had recovered at law. ^m From
the sale of that justice which every citizen has a right to demand, it was an
easy transition to withhold or deny it. Fines were received for the king's
help against the adverse suitor; that is, for perversion of justice, or for
delay.  Sometimes they were paid by opposite parties, and, of course, for
opposite ends.  These were called counterfines; but the money was sometimes,
or as Lord Lyttelton thinks, invariably, returned to the unsuccessful suitor.
^n

[Footnote i: The following simple picture of that reign from the Saxon
Chronicle may be worth inserting.  "The nobles and bishops built castles, and
filled them with devilish and wicked men, and oppressed the people, cruelly
torturing men for their money.  They imposed taxes upon towns, and, when they
had exhausted them of everything, set them on fire.  You might travel a day,
and not find one man living in a town, nor any land in cultivation.  Never did
the country suffer greater evils.  If two or three men were seen riding up to
a town, all its inhabitants left it, taking them for plunderers.  And this
lasted, growing worse and worse, throughout Stephen's reign.  Men said openly
that Christ and his saints were asleep." P. 230.]

[Footnote j: The earliest record in the Pipe-office is that which Madox, in
conformity to the usage of others, cites by the name of Magnum Rotulum quinto
Stephani.  But in a particular dissertation, subjoined to his History of the
Exchequer, he inclines, though not decisively, to refer this record to the
reign of Henry I.]

[Footnote k: Madox, c. 10.]

[Footnote l: Id., c. 7.]

[Footnote m: Id., c. 12 and 13.]

[Footnote n: The most opposite instances of these exactions are well selected
from Madox by Hume, Appendix II.; upon which account I have gone less into
detail than would otherwise have been necessary.]

     Among a people imperfectly civilized the most outrageous injustice
towards individuals may pass without the slightest notice, while in matters
affecting the community the powers of government are exceedingly controlled.
It becomes therefore an important question what prerogative these Norman kings
were used to exercise in raising money and in general legislation.  By the
prevailing feudal customs the lord was entitled to demand a pecuniary aid of
his vassals in certain cases.  These were, in England, to make his eldest son
a knight, to marry his eldest daughter, and to ransom himself from captivity.
Accordingly, when such circumstances occurred, aids were levied by the crown
upon its tenants, at the rate of a mark or a pound for every knight's fee. ^o
These aids, being strictly due in the prescribed cases, were taken without
requiring the consent of parliament.  Escuage, which was a commutation for the
personal service of military tenants in war, having rather the appearance of
an indulgence than an imposition, might reasonably be levied by the king. ^p
It was not till the charter of John that escuage became parliamentary
assessment; the custom of commuting service having then grown general, and the
rate of commutation being variable.

[Footnote o: The "reasonable aid" was fixed by the Statute of Westminster I.,
3 Edw. I., c. 36, at twenty shillings for every knight's fee, and as much for
every 20l. value of land held by socage.  The aid pour faire fils chevalier
might be raised when he entered into his fifteenth year; pour fille marier,
when she reached the age of seven.]

[Footnote p: Fit interdum, ut imminente vel insurgente in regnum hostium
machinatione, decernat rex de singulis feodis militum summam aliquam solvi,
marcam scilicet, vel libram unam; unde militibus stipendia vel donativa
succedant.  Mavult enim princeps stipendiarios quam domesticos bellicis
exponere casibus.  Haec itaque summa, quia nomine scutorum solvitur, scutagium
nominatur.  Dialogus de Scaccario, ad finem.  Madox, Hist. Exchequer, p. 25
(edit. in folio).]

     None but military tenants could be liable for escuage; but the inferior
subjects of the crown were oppressed by tallages. ^q The demesne lands of the
king and all royal towns were liable to tallage; an imposition far more
rigorous and irregular than those which fell upon the gentry.  Tallages were
continually raised upon different towns during all the Norman reigns without
the consent of parliament, which neither represented them nor cared for their
interests.  The itinerant justices in their circuit usually set this tax.
Sometimes the tallage was assessed in gross upon a town, and collected by the
burgesses; sometimes individually at the judgment of the justices.  There was
an appeal from an excessive assessment to the barons of the exchequer.
Inferior lords might tallage their own tenants and demesne towns, though not,
it seems, without the king's permission. ^r Customs upon the import and export
of merchandise, of which the prisage of wine, that is, a right of taking two
casks out of each vessel, seems the most material, were immemorially exacted
by the crown.  There is no appearance that these originated with parliament.
^s Another tax, extending to all the lands of the kingdom, was Danegeld, the
shipmoney of those times.  This name had been originally given to the tax
imposed under Ethelred II., in order to raise a tribute exacted by the Danes.
It was afterwards applied to a permanent contribution for the public defence
against the same enemies.  But after the Conquest this tax is said to have
been only occasionally required; and the latest instance on record of its
payment is in the 20th of Henry II.  Its imposition appears to have been at
the king's discretion. ^t

[Footnote q: The tenant in capite was entitled to be reimbursed what would
have been his escuage by his vassals even if he performed personal service.
Madox, c. 16.]

[Footnote r: For the important subject of tallages, see Madox, c. 17.]

[Footnote s: Madox, c. 18.  Hale's Treatise on the Custom in Hargrave's
Tracts, vol. i. p. 116.]

[Footnote t: Henr. Huntingdon, l. v. p. 205.  Dialogus de Scaccario, c. 11.
Madox, c. 17. Lyttelton's Henry II., vol. ii. p. 170.]

     The right of general legislation was undoubtedly placed in the king,
conjointly with his great council, ^u or, if the expression be thought more
proper, with their advice.  So little opposition was found in these assemblies
by the early Norman kings, that they gratified their own love of pomp, as well
as the pride of their barons, by consulting them in every important business.
But the limits of legislative power were extremely indefinite.  New laws, like
new taxes, affecting the community required the sanction of that assembly
which was supposed to represent it; but there was no security for individuals
against acts of prerogative, which we should justly consider as most
tyrannical.  Henry II., the best of these monarchs, banished from England the
relations and friends of Becket, to the number of four hundred.  At another
time he sent over from Normandy an injunction, that all the kindred of those
who obeyed a papal interdict should be banished, and their estates
confiscated. ^v

[Footnote u: Glanvil, Prologus ad Tractatum de Consuetud.]

[Footnote v: Hoveden, p. 496.  Lyttelton, vol. ii. p. 530.  The latter says
that this edict must have been framed by the king with the advice and assent
of his council.  But if he means his great council, I cannot suppose that all
the barons and tenants in capite could have been duly summoned to a council
held beyond seas.  Some English barons might doubtless have been with the
king, as at Verneuil in 1176, where a mixed assembly of English and French
enacted laws for both countries.  Benedict. Abbas apud Hume.  So at
Northampton, in 1165, several Norman barons voted; nor is any notice taken of
this as irregular.  Fitz Stephen, ibid.  So unfixed, or rather unformed, were
all constitutional principals. [Note X.]]