ordered him to return a church to the abbot of Hulme’s fee, if the abbot
could show that it had been transferred to the fee of another without
judgment since the death of King Henry I; ‘and unless you do it, the
archbishop of Canterbury shall’.^99 In another case heard ‘by the
command of the king’ in the court of the archbishop of Canterbury con-
cerning lands belonging to the archbishop’s manor of Wimbledon and
Barnes, one Peter claimed possession from the canons of St. Paul’s
because he said his father had it on the day King Henry I died, and then
his mother until she was ejected by force: but because he made no
mention of a fee or inheritance, the court denied him seisin, without
prejudice to the question of right.^100 In the action of mort d’ancestor
described by ‘Glanvill’ a jury was required to say before the king or his
justices whether the demandant was the ‘next heir’ of his father, and
whether the latter had died since ‘the king’s first coronation... seised
in demesne as of fee’ of the tenement in question (i.e. had been in
actual occupation of it as heritable property). If he was unsuccessful in
gaining seisin by this ‘petty assize’, the demandant could nevertheless
seek to prove that the land was his ‘right and inheritance’, making his
proof by judicial combat, or (if the tenant in occupation of the land
chose) by that ‘royal benefit granted to the people by the goodness of
the king’, a grand assize: the procedure according to which four knights
chose twelve knights from the neighbourhood to swear to the descent of
the land back to a remoter date of limitation (perhaps Henry I’s
reign, Stephen’s being pointedly ignored). Legal actions could also start
with writs ordering lords to receive homage and relief or tenants to
perform their ‘customs and services’, though in course of time the
element of service, even in the form of money-rents, fell away from
the tenure (‘holding’) of a fee, leaving the tenant ‘in fee simple’ with
unconditional ownership.^101
210 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
Government in Medieval England and Normandy, ed. Garnett and Hudson, 222; id., ‘Court
cases and legal arguments in England, c. 1066–1166’, TRHS, 6th ser. 10 (2000), which main-
tains that disputes about land tenure in England were conducted with less recourse to force
and more use of legal norms, especially norms of reasonable procedure; see RRANii, appx.
nos. xliii, li, cxxxiv, clxxx, ccxv, ccxxxvi, ccxxxviii, cclvi; and iii, nos. 40, 180, 312, 912, 999,
for grants by Henry I and Henry II of land to be held as the grantee’s ancestor held it, or as it
was held at a date in the past.
(^99) English Lawsuits, 310 (no. 359).
(^100) Ibid. 351 (no. 393).
(^101) Glanvill, 23, 150 ff., 180; Early Registers of Writs, 10 (writ 27), 230–1.