comfort of thinking that his estate would, perhaps for the next twenty years, go to enrich the coffers of his sovereign. On this head Henry speaks less clearly than he speaks on some other points; but his words certainly seem to imply that the wardship of the tenant-in-chief was to go, not to the king, but to the mother or to some kinsman.[1] If so, either Henry himself or his successors thought better of the matter. The right of wardship, as a privilege of the king or other lord, appears in full force in the law-book of Randolf of Glanville.[2]
Extent of Flambard's changes.
Wardship and marriage special to England and Normandy.
The two sides of feudalism.
When we attribute all these exactions and "unrighteousnesses"
to the device of Flambard, it is of
course not meant that they were altogether unheard of
either before his day or beyond the lands over which
his influence reached. Traces of these claims, or of
some of them, are to be found wherever and whenever
feudal notions about the tenure of land had crept in.
All that is meant is that claims which were vaguely
growing up were put by Flambard into a distinct and
systematic shape. What William the Great did on occasion,
for reasons of state, William the Red did as a
matter of course, as an ordinary means of making
money.[3] And it is significant that two of the most
oppressive of these claims, that of wardship and the
kindred claim of marriage, were, in their fully developed
shape, peculiar or nearly so to the lands
where Rufus reigned and Flambard governed, to the
English kingdom and the Norman duchy.[4] I have said
elsewhere that, of the two sides of feudalism, our Norman
kings carefully shut out the side which tended to
- ↑ Select Charters, 97. "Et terræ et liberorum custos erit sive uxor sive alius propinquorum qui justius esse debeat."
- ↑ See Tractatus de Legibus, vii. 9. 10; and Phillips, Englische Reichs- und Rechtsgeschichte, ii. 204.
- ↑ See N. C. vol. v. p. 374.
- ↑ This was pointed out by Hallam, Middle Ages, i. 128, ed. 1846.
