Serjeanty
English feudalism |
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Manorialism |
Feudal land tenure in England |
Feudal duties |
Feudalism |
Under feudalism in France and England during the Middle Ages, tenure by serjeanty (/ˈsɑːrdʒənti/) was a form of tenure in return for a specified duty other than standard knight-service.
Etymology
The word comes from the French noun sergent, itself from the Latin serviens, servientis, "serving", the
" is derived from the same source, though developing an entirely different meaning.Origins and development
Serjeanty originated in the assignation of an estate in land on condition of the performance of a certain duty other than knight-service, usually the discharge of duties in the household of the king or a noble. It ranged from non-standard service in the king's army (distinguished only by equipment from that of the knight), to petty renders (for example the rendering of a quantity of basic food such as a goose) scarcely distinguishable from those of the rent-paying tenant or socager.
The legal historians
The historian Mary Bateson stated as follows concerning serjeanties:
(They) were neither always military nor always agricultural, but might approach very closely the service of knights or the service of farmers ... The serjeanty of holding the king's head when he made a rough passage across the Channel, of pulling a rope when his vessel landed, of counting his chessmen on Christmas Day, of bringing fuel to his castle, of doing his carpentry, of finding his pot-herbs, of forging his irons for his ploughs, of tending his garden, of nursing the hounds gored and injured in the hunt, of serving as veterinary to his sick falcons, such and many others might be the ceremonial or menial services due from a given serjeanty.
The varieties of serjeanty were later increased by lawyers, who for the sake of convenience categorised under this head such duties as escort service to the
Domesday Book
Serjeants (servientes) already appear as a distinct class in the
Some of the Domesday Book tenants may have been serjeants before the Norman Conquest, in the time of King Edward the Confessor. For instance, a certain Siward Accipitrarius (from Latin accipiter, "hawk"[5]), presumably hawker to Edward the Confessor, held from the king an estate worth £7 in Somerset and did so in an area appropriate to his occupation, close to a water habitat.[6] J. H. Round ascribed the development of serjeanties in England to Norman influence, though he did not dismiss earlier roots.[7] The Anglo-Saxon historian James Campbell has suggested that serjeanties such as the messenger services recorded in the 13th century may represent "semi-fossilised remnants of important parts of the Anglo-Saxon governmental system".[8]
Grand serjeanty versus petty serjeanty
The germ of the later distinction between "grand" (French: grand, "large") and "petty" (French petit, "small") serjeanty is found in the Magna Carta of 1215, the king there renouncing the right of prerogative wardship in the case of those who held of him by the render of small articles. The legal doctrine which developed that serjeanties were inalienable (i.e. non-transferable) and impartible, led during the reign of King Henry III (1216–1272) to the arrentation of those serjeanties the lands of which had been partly alienated, which were thereby converted into socage tenures (i.e. paying money rents), or in some cases, tenures by knight-service. Gradually the gulf widened, and "petty" serjeanties, consisting of renders, together with serjeanties held of mesne lords, sank into socage, while "grand" serjeanties, the holders of which performed their service in person, became alone liable to the burden of wardship and marriage[clarification needed]. In Littleton's Tenures (15th century), this distinction appears as well defined, but the development was one of legal theory.
Disintegration
By the reign of King
Once it began to give way, serjeanty disintegrated more quickly and easily than the other tenures as the feudal conception of society lost its hold...Its miscellaneous services had...many fates. A large number soon became obsolete; others were commuted to money payments or changed to knight's service; a few that were honourable or ornamental were retained in their original form as part of the coronation ceremony. Some being still useful were performed by deputy, or absorbed into the regular administrative system.[9]
When the military tenure of knight-service was abolished at the
Modern remnants
Although today any surviving remnants of grand sergeanty are regarded as roles of high honour, it should be remembered that originally grand sergeanty was a duty, not a right. Clearly even by the medieval era much grand sergeanty had become in practice merely a token of high honour given by a monarch, where the duty was patently absurd and entirely non-onerous, except for the requirement of the physical presence of the tenant concerned. The duty of supporting the king's right arm was still performed at the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. Although the first holder of such heritable grand sergeanties was clearly a man well liked and respected by the appointing monarch, and suitable to the role, the character of the tenant's heir in the duty, often involving close personal proximity, might be less pleasing to future monarchs. Today, those with duties pertaining to the coronation are required to make their case to perform them at the Court of Claims.
The meaning of serjeant as a household officer is still preserved in the monarch's serjeants-at-arms, serjeant-surgeons and serjeant-trumpeter. The horse and foot serjeants (servientes) of the king's army in the 12th century, who ranked after the knights and were more lightly armed, were unconnected with land tenure.
Examples of grand serjeanty
- Manor of Farnham, duty to provide white kid gloves and support king's right arm, while the Royal Sceptre was in his hand during Coronation, from the late 11th century until 1327.
- Manor of Worksop, ibid., from 1327.
- Manor of Scrivelsby, The King's Champion
- Manor of Kingston Russellduty to count the King's chessmen and storing them away after a game
- Manor of Kenninghall, the Chief Butler of England
- Manor of Bardolf-in-Addington, duty to serve a mess of Dillegrout at coronations, 1066 until 1821[11]
- Manor of Nether Bilsington, duty to present three Maple cups
- Manor of Eston-le-Mount, Chief Larderer and caterer
- Manor of Wymondley, duty to bear a silver-gilt cup
- Manor of Lyston, duty to bear a charger of wafers
- Manor of Pelham, Chief Sewer (server)
- Manor of Heydon, duty to bear a towel for washing the monarch's hands
- Manor of Bedford, Almoner
- naperer
- larderer
- The manor of Royal Forestof Kinver
Hereditary offices in gross
Serjeanty is to be distinguished from offices held hereditarily "in gross". These are not serjeanties, as they were not incidents of the tenure of a manor or other land. They are heritable in the same way as
Examples include:
- the Lord Great Chamberlain;
- the duty to carry the spurs at a coronation, vested in descendants of the Earl of Pembroke. In 2023, the spurs were carried by Delaval Astley, 23rd Baron Hastings and Simon Abney-Hastings, 15th Earl of Loudoun, who shares with other descendants of 20th Baroness Grey de Ruthyn including the Earl of Romney, the Viscount St Davids and the Baron Churston.
See also
- Quia Emptores
- History of English land law
- Feudal land tenure
References
- ^ Collins Dictionary of the English Language, p.1394
- ^ Cassell's Latin Dictionary, Marchant, J.R.V, & Charles, Joseph F., (Eds.), Revised Edition, 1928, p.519
- ISBN 978-1-58477-718-2.
- ^ Round, King's serjeants. pp. 6–8.
- ^ Cassell's Latin Dictionary; Marchant, J. R. V. & Charles, Joseph F., (eds.), revised edition, 1928, p. 6
- ^ Oggins, Kings and their Hawks. pp. 46–7.
- ^ Round, King's serjeants. pp. 14–20, 270.
- ^ Campbell, "Agents." p. 211.
- ^ Kimball, Serjeanty tenure. p. 250.
- ^ Cap. 24
- ISBN 978-1-136-22265-8.
Secondary sources
- Round, J. Horace. The King's Serjeants & Officers of State with their Coronation Services. London, 1911. PDF available from the Internet Archive.
- Oggins, Robin S. The Kings and Their Hawks. New Haven, 2004.
- Pollock, Sir Frederick and Frederic William Maitland. History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. 2nd edition. 1898 (first edition 1895). Available from the Internet Archive.
- (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
Further reading
Primary sources
- Domesday Book, see e.g. the Victoria History of Hampshire, vol. I.
- Rolls series.
- Book of Fees
Secondary sources
- Brand, Paul. "The Serjeants of the Common Bench in the reign of Edward I. An Emerging Professional Elite." In Thirteenth century England VII: Proceedings of the Durham conference 1997, ed. M. Prestwich, R. H. Britnell, and R. Frame. Woodbridge, 1999. 81–102.
- Campbell, James. "Some Agents and Agencies of the Late Anglo-Saxon State." Domesday Studies, ed. J. C. Holt. Woodbridge, 1987. 201-18.
- Kimball, Elisabeth G. Serjeanty tenure in medieval England. Yale Historical Publications Miscellany 30. New Haven and London, 1936.
- Oggins, V. D. and Robin S. Oggins. "Hawkers and falconers along the Ouse. A geographic principle of location in some serjeanty and related holdings." Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 80 (1992 for 1991)': 7–20.
- Poole, Austin Lane. Obligations of Society in the XII and XIII Centuries. Oxford, 1946. Chapter[which?].
- Older works
- McKechnie, William Sharp, Magna Carta (1905).
- Blount, Tenures. Useful, but its editions are very uncritical.
- Franks, Coronation Claims.