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A great deal of it was held by military service; the tenant-in-chief of this land, who might be either a layman or an ecclesiastic, had to render this military service to the king, while the sub-tenants had to render it to the tenants-in-chief.
The tenant-in-chief of the king who was rich enough had his cause carried to the King's Court of barons, where he was tried by his peers. The poorer vassals, with the mass of the people, sought such justice as was to be had in the old English courts, the Shire Court held by the sheriff, and, where this survived, the Hundred Court summoned by the bailiff.
Where the general duty of allegiance has lapsed into oblivion, the tenant-in-chief is in all but name a dependent king, and the feudal state becomes a federation under a hereditary president, who occasionally arbitrates between the members of the federation and occasionally leads them out to war.
It is only at the cost of long and ruinous conflicts that bishops and other prelates establish some distinction between their position and that of the ordinary tenant-in-chief. Even so it remains the law that the principal endowments of every religious foundation are fiefs held under a feudal contract of service.
III. It was ordered that "no tenant-in-chief of the king, no officer of his household, or of his demesne, should be excommunicated, or his lands put under an interdict, until application had been made to the king, or in his absence to the grand justiciary, who ought to take care that what belongs to the king's courts shall be there determined, and what belongs to the ecclesiastical courts shall be determined in them."
The real strife was about the seven remaining statutes, which declared that an accused clerk must first appear before the king's court, and that the justiciar should then send a royal officer with him to watch the trial at the ecclesiastical court, and if he were found guilty the Church should no longer protect him; that the chief clergy might not leave the realm without the king's permission; that appeals might not be carried to the Papal Court without the king's consent; that no tenant-in-chief of the king might be excommunicated without the leave of the king; that the revenues of vacant sees should fall to the king, until a new appointment had been made in his court; that questions of advowsons or presentations to livings questions which at that time represented comparatively a vast amount of property should be tried in the king's court; and that the king's judges should decide in matters of debt, even where the case included a question of perjury or broken faith, which was claimed as a matter for ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
It was now established that every tenant-in-chief should do homage to the king; that every superior tenant should do homage to his lord; that every villein should be the bondman of the free; and that every slave should, without any property however limited and insecure, be the absolute chattel of some master. The whole system was connected with military service. This was the feudal system.
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