generally prized as an economic asset, and the fief was evolving into the
‘fee simple’, the most unconditional form of property recognized by
English law. Judgments of the Conqueror’s court ordered the abbot of
Westminster’s French and English tenants to come to an agreement with
their lord concerning their fiefs, and the abbot of Evesham to hold his
lands of the bishop of Worcester’s fee as the bishop’s other feudatiheld
theirs.^92 Around the end of the twelfth century Jocelin of Brakelond,
describing Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmund’s estate-management,
would list the rights of ‘every lord of a fief owing homage’ to escheats,
a general aid, ‘wardships of boys and bestowal of widows and girls [in
marriage] in those fiefs whence he has [himself] received homage’.^93
With the legal rights of the lord went the right of his tenants to have
their homage received for the fiefs which were lawfully theirs. As in Italy
and France it was in their lords’ courts before the other free tenants that
heirs demanded seisin of their ancestors’ fees. An English law of
property grew from the interventions of the king to make the feudal
processes work.^94 A writ of Henry I told Absolon of Sandwich to ‘do
right’ to his lord, the abbot of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, according to
the judgment of the seignorial court, or the abbot should recover his
fee.^95 Another ordered the sheriff to send ‘wise men’ to ‘the court of the
[abbey of Thorney’s patron-]saint’ to see that right was done to Robert
of Staverton, who claimed to hold land in fee farm (i.e. for the service
of a money-rent) from the abbey and to have been refused possession by
the abbot without a judgment by the court of his freeholders. (Probably
the procedure called toltwould already have brought the case into the
shire court if ‘proof of default of right’ in the seignorial court had been
made to four knights.^96 ) In inheritance cases an important distinction
had already appeared. The ‘Laws of Henry I’ show that the heir’s
right to the ancestral fee (the primum feodum) was stronger than to his
ancestor’s acquisitions, which the dead person could have given away
again with his lord’s concurrence.^97
To quote John Hudson, this was already, even before Henry II’s inno-
vations, ‘not a ‘truly feudal world’ of land-holding based on personal
relationships, but one in which more proprietary notions had an essen-
tial place’.^98 Early in Henry II’s reign a writ to the bishop of Norwich
The law of land-holding 209(^92) English Lawsuits, i. 36 (no. 13), 39 (no. 15), 73 (no. 88), 176–7 (no. 206);
(^93) The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, ed. and tr. H. E. Butler (London, 1949), 105.
(^94) English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, i. 52–88 (for the disputes about who held
land from whom recorded in Domesday book), 162 (no. 194), 191 (no. 225), 222–3, 228–9,
237 (no. 281).^95 English Lawsuits,194 (no. 227).
(^96) English Lawsuits,155–6; Glanvill, 139–40.
(^97) Leges Henrici Primi, ed. Downer, 160 (§48,10,11), 197 (§61,13b), 225 (70, 21–21a); cf.
above, 184 and 335–6.
(^98) John Hudson, ‘Anglo-Norman Land Law and the Origins of Property’, in Law and