The King to be every man's heir.
Flambard's lasting burthens and exactions. Chronicler is the best record of a matter of no small constitutional importance. The Red King "would be ilk man's heir, ordered and lewd."[1] In those words lay the whole root of the matter. The great work of the administration of Flambard, the great work of the reign of Rufus, was to put in order a system of rules by which the King might be the heir of every man. Those few words, which might seem to have dropped from the Chronicler in a moment of embittered sarcasm, do indeed set forth the formal beginning of a series of burthens and exactions under which Englishmen, and preeminently the rich and noble among Englishmen, groaned for not much less than six hundred years after Flambard's days.
The Feudal Tenures.
Abolished 1660.
Tenure in chivalry.
In short the "unrighteousness" ordained by William
Rufus and Randolf Flambard[2] are no other than those
feudal tenures and feudal burthens which even the Parliament
which elected Charles the Second, in the midst of
its self-abasement and betrayal of its own ancient rights,
declared to have been "much more burthensome, grievous,
and prejudicial to the kingdom than they have
been beneficial to the king."[3] Assuredly they were as
burthensome, grievous, and prejudicial to the kingdom
in the eleventh century as they were in the seventeenth;
but assuredly they were found in the eleventh century
to be highly beneficial to the King, or they would not
have been ordained by Rufus and Flambard. We have
reached the age of chivalry; and tenure in chivalry,
- ↑ Chron. Petrib. 1100. "Forðan þe he ælces mannes gehadodes and læwedes yrfenuma beon wolde."
- ↑ William of Malmesbury (v. 393) seems to sum up the reforms of Henry in the words "injustitias a fratre et Rannulfo institutas prohibuit." "Justitiæ" is a technical phrase (see N. C. vol. iv. pp. 559, 560). "Injustitiæ," as here used, is something like our "unlaw" and "ungeld."
- ↑ Revised Statutes, i. 725. By some chance this statute is printed in this collection, which commonly leaves out the statutes which are of most historical importance.
