28
LANDHOLDING IN ENGLAND
included in the feudal burdens—which represented rent, as the fifteenths and tenths represented taxes.
As rent began to be substituted for personal service, the feudal system degenerated more and more into a mere system of extortion, described by Blackstone in a passage which shows the seamy side of the system. Those who have read the "Paston Letters" will remember instances of the abuses as to wards.
"By the degenerating of knight-service, or personal military duty, into escuage, or pecuniary assessments, all the advantages (either promised or real) of the feudal constitution were destroyed, and nothing but the hardships remained. Instead of forming a national militia … the whole of this system of tenures now tended to nothing else but a wretched means of raising money to pay an army of occasional mercenaries. In the meantime the families of all our nobility and gentry groaned under the intolerable burthens, which (in consequence of the fiction adopted after the Conquest) were introduced and laid upon them by the subtlety and finesse of the Norman lawyers. For besides the scutages … which however were assessed by themselves in Parliament, they might be called upon by the king or lord paramount for aids, whenever his eldest son was to be knighted, or his eldest daughter married; not to forget the ransom of his own person. The heir, on the death of his ancestor, if of full age, was plundered of the first emolument arising from his inheritance, by way of relief and primer seisin; and, if under age, of the whole of his estate during infancy. And then, as Sir Thomas Smith very feelingly complains, 'when he came to his own, after he was out of wardship, his woods decayed; houses fallen down, stock wasted and gone, lands let forth, and ploughed to be barren,' to make amends; he was, yet to pay half a year's profits as a fine for suing out his livery; and also the price or value of his marriage, if he refused such wife as his lord and guardian had bartered for, and imposed upon him; or twice that value, if he married another woman. Add to this, the untimely and expensive honour of knighthood, to make his poverty more completely splendid.
