United States or Nicaragua ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This was something new, that is, it was as new as anything ever is in constitutional history. It was the application of an old process to a new use. In the second place large sums of money were raised, in a purely arbitrary way, it would seem, both as to persons paying and sums paid, from members of the non-feudal community and also from some tenants in chief who at the same time paid scutage.
When called upon to surrender the garrison answered that they would only yield at their lord's orders, and that the more as they were not bound to the king by homage or fealty. Nothing was left but a fight to the death. The royalists made strenuous efforts. A new scutage, the "scutage of Bedford," was imposed on the realm.
But the denial of justice under John was a small danger compared with the lawless exactions both of himself and his predecessor. Richard had increased the amount of the scutage which Henry II. had introduced, and applied it to raise funds for his ransom.
He instituted scutage, by which the great feudatories granted a money payment instead of bringing with them to the army hordes of their sub-tenants who might obey them rather than the king; this enabled the king to hire mercenaries who respected him but not the feudatories. He cashiered all the sheriffs at once, to explode their pretensions to hereditary tenure of their office.
In such cases, when called on for the service, they would be obliged to hire the required number of knights, and the suggestion that they should pay the necessary sum to the king and let him find the soldiers would be a natural one and probably agreeable to both sides. The scutage of the present year does not seem to have gone beyond this practice.
With the exception of the three customary feudal aids which still remained to the crown, 'no scutage or aid shall be imposed in our realm save by the Common Council of the realm; and to this Great Council it was provided that prelates and the greater barons should be summoned by special writ, and all tenants in chief through the sheriffs and bailiffs, at least forty days before.
Richard had increased the amount of the scutage which Henry the Second had introduced, and applied it to raise funds for his ransom. He had restored the Danegeld, or land-tax, so often abolished, under the new name of "carucage," had seized the wool of the Cistercians and the plate of the churches, and rated movables as well as land.
We find, as early as 1181, the Assize of Arms, which revives the ancient fyrd or militia. Twenty-two years before scutage had been substituted for military service; but this was merely a matter of feudal tenure. Yet so early was a direct call for troops forbidden to the crown.
More important was a scutage, probably ordered at this time, of the unusual rate of two marks on the knight's fee, twenty shillings having been the previous limit as men remembered it. By June 20 John's business in England was done, and by July 1 he was again at Rouen to watch the course of events in the conflict still undecided.
It was at this time, so far as our present evidence goes and unless a precedent had been made in a small way in a scutage of 1157 for the campaign in Wales, that the principle of scutage was extended from ecclesiastical to lay tenants in chief.
Word Of The Day