renders scarcely distinguishable from those of the rent-paying tenant or socager. Serjeanties, as Miss Bateson has expressed it, “were neither always military nor always agricultural, but might approach very closely the service of knights or the service of farmers. . . . The serjeanty of holding the king's head when he made a rough passage across the Channel, of pulling a rope when his vessel landed, of counting his chessmen on Christmas day, of bringing fuel to his castle, of doing his carpentry, of finding his potherbs, of forging his irons for his ploughs, of tending his garden, of nursing the hounds gored and injured in the hunt, of serving as veterinary to his sick falcons, such and many others might be the ceremonial or menial services due from a given serjeanty.” The many varieties of serjeanty were afterwards increased by lawyers classing for convenience under this head such duties as those of escort service to the abbess of Barking, or of military service on the Welsh border by the men of Archenfield.
Serjeants (servientes) are already entered as a distinct class in Domesday Book (1086), though not in all cases differentiated from the barons, who held by knight-service. Sometimes, as in the case of three Hampshire serjeanties—those of acting as king's marshal, of finding an archer for his service, and of keeping the gaol in Winchester Castle—the tenure can be definitely traced as far back as Domesday. It is probable, however, that many supposed tenures by serjeanty were not really such, although so described in returns, in inquests after death, and other records. The simplest legal test of the tenure was that Serjeants, though liable to the feudal exactions of wardship, &c., were not liable to scutage; they made in place of this exaction special composition with the crown.
The germ of the later distinction between “grand” and “petty” serjeanty is found in the Great Charter (1215), the king there renouncing the right of prerogative wardship in the case of those who held of him by the render of small articles. The legal doctrine that serjeanties were (a) inalienable, (b) impartible, led to the “arrentation,” under Henry III., of serjeanties the lands of which had been partly alienated, and which were converted into socage tenures, or, in some cases, tenures by knight-service. Gradually the gulf widened, and “petty” serjeanties, consisting of renders,[1] together with serjeanties held of mesne lords, sank into socage, while “grand” serjeanties, the holders of which performed their service in person, became alone liable to the burden of wardship and marriage. In Littleton's Tenures this distinction appears as well defined, but the development was one of legal theory.
When the military tenure of knight-service was abolished at the Restoration (by 12 Charles II., cap. 24), that of grand serjeanty was retained, doubtless on account of its honorary character, it being then limited in practice to the performance of certain duties at coronations, the discharge of which as a right has always been coveted, and the earliest record of which is that of Queen Eleanor's coronation in 1236. The most conspicuous are those of champion, appurtenant to the Dymokes' manor of Scrivelsby, and of supporting the king's right arm, appurtenant to that of Worksop. The latter duty was performed at the coronation of King Edward VII. (1902).
The meaning of serjeant as a household officer is still preserved in the king's serjeants-at-arms, serjeant-surgeons and serjeant-trumpeter. The horse and foot serjeants (servientes) of the king's host in the 12th century, who ranked after the knights and were more lightly armed, were unconnected with tenure.
The best summary of tenure by serjeanty is in Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law; McKechnie's Magna Carta (1905) should also be consulted; and for Domesday the Victoria History of Hampshire, vol. i. The best list of serjeanties is in the Red Book of the Exchequer (“Rolls” series), but the Testa de Nevill (Record Commission) contains the most valuable records concerning them. Blount's Tenures is useful, but its modern editions very uncritical. Wollaston's Coronation Claims is the best authority on its subject. (J. H. R.)
SERMON (Lat. sermo, a discourse), an oration delivered from a pulpit with fullness and rhetorical effect. Pascal, than whom no greater authority can be desired, defines a sermon as a religious address, in which the word of God is stated and explained, and in which an audience is excited to the practice of virtue. This may be so extended as to include a discourse in favour of pure morality, though, even in that case, the morals are founded on Christian doctrine, and even the sermon which the fox preaches in La Fontaine's Fables is a parody of a Christian discourse. The Latin sermons of St Augustine, of which 384 are extant, have been taken as their models by all sensible subsequent divines, for it was he who rejected the formal arrangement of the divisions of his theme, and insisted that simplicity and familiarity of style were not incompatible with dignity and religion. His object was not to dazzle by a conformity with the artificial rules of oratory, but to move the soul of the listener by a direct appeal to his conscience. His adage was Qui sophistice loquitur odibilis est, and his influence has been exercised ever since in warning the Christian orator against artificiality and in urging upon him the necessity of awakening the heart. Nevertheless, on many occasions, fashion has led the preachers of a particular epoch to develop rules for the composition of sermons, the value of which is more than doubtful. Cardinal Siffrein, who is known as the Abbé Maury (1746-1817), resumed all the known artifices of sermon-style in a volume which has a permanent historical value, the well-known Essai sur l'eloquence de la chaire (1810); he was himself rather a fiery politician than a persuasive divine. Maury describes all the divisions of which a good sermon should consist—an exordium, a proposition, a section, a confirmation in two or more points, a peroration; and he holds that a sermon on morals should have but two points, while one on the Passion must have three. These are effects of pedantry, and seem rather to be founded on a cold-blooded analysis of celebrated sermons than on any instinctive sense of the duty of the preacher. We may wish to see in a good sermon, what Bossuet recommended, not the result of slow and tedious study, but the flush of a celestial fervour. Voltaire makes an interesting observation on the technical difference between an English and a French sermon in the 18th century; the former, he says, is a solid and somewhat dry dissertation which the preacher reads to the congregation without a gesture and without any inflection of his voice; the latter is a long declamation, scrupulously divided into three points, and recited by heart with enthusiasm.
Among the earliest examples of pulpit oratory which have been preserved in English literature, the discourses of Wycliffe and his disciples may be passed by, to arrive at the English sermons of John Fisher (1469?-1535), which have a distinct literary value. But Hugh Latimer (1485?-1555) is the first great English preacher, and the wit and power of his sermons (1549) give them prominence in our literature. One of the expository discourses of John Knox (1505-1572), we are told, was of more power to awaken his hearers than a blast from “five hundred trumpets.” When we come to Elizabethan times, we possess a few examples of the sermons of the “judicious” Hooker (1554-1600); Henry Smith (1550-1591) was styled “the prime preacher of the nation”; and Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), whose sermons were posthumously printed at the command of James I. in 1628, dazzled his contemporaries by the brilliancy of his euphemism; Andrewes was called “the star of preachers.” At a slightly later date John Donne (1573-1621) and Joseph Hall (1574-1656) divided the suffrages of the pious. In the middle of the 17th century the sermon became one of the most highly-cultivated forms of intellectual entertainment in Great Britain, and when the theatres were closed at the Commonwealth it grew to be the only public form of eloquence. It is impossible to name all the eminent preachers of this time, but a few must be mentioned. John Hales (1584-1656); Edmund Calamy (1600-1666); the Cambridge Platonist, Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1685); Richard Baxter (1615-1691); the puritan John Owen (1616-1683); the philosophical Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688); Archbishop Leighton (1611-1684)—each of these holds an eminent position in the records of pulpit eloquence, but all were outshone by the gorgeous oratory and art of Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), who is the most illustrious
- ↑ Usually a bow, sword, dagger or other small thing belonging to war.
