The English Historical Review NO. CXXXVIIL— APRIL 1920 * Barony and Thanage WHEN the officials of the king's courts said of a man not only that he held a barony {tenuit baaronim) but also that he held by barony {tenuit per baroniam), what did they mean ? Was tenure by barony realjy a distinct and certain mode of tenure to be classed as such with tenure by knight-service or by ser- jeanty ; or was it merely a variety of tenure by knight-service, from which it was distinguished only by a difference in the amount of the relief to be paid and by ' a few legal consequences of a subordinate kind ' ? ^ Was barony a dignity conferring on the holder a title of honour and the right to be summoned to the king's council in the twelfth century as in the twentieth ? For many a year English lawyers and historians have debated these questions without finding satisfactory answers to any but the last. However the case may be with the lawyers, the historians are now convinced that whatever tenure by barony may have been, it never gave a man the right to be summoned to the king's council, though it imposed on him the duty of attending it if summoned.^ Most of them, too, are agreed that tenure by barony never conferred on the tenant a title of honour, though some demur to this, having in mind the Barons of Burford, Greystoke, and Stafford. But they are as far as ever from determining what tenure by barony was. Yet a difference between tenure by barony and tenure by knight-service there must have been. Quite apart from the fact that there were over a dozen baronies in England that were not held by knight-service at all,^ there is the matter of the relief.
- Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, u 259.
^ Constitutions of Clarendon ( 1 164), c. xi : ' Archiepiscopi, episcopi, et universi qui de rege tenent in capite, et habent possessiones suas de domino rege sicut baroniam . . . et sicut barones ceteri, debent interesse iudiciis curiae regis cum baronibus. . . .'
- e. g. the comage baronies of Cumberland ; see below, pp. 183 £f. The existence of
such baronies is distinctly implied in Magna Carta, c. 2, which expressly deals only with the reliefs due from fiefs held by knight-service. VOL. XXXV. — NO. CXXXVIII. M
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