The essential feature we have to keep in view when examining the growth of knight service is the _servitium debitum_, or quota of knight service due to the crown from each fief. This has, I venture to think, been obscured and lost sight of in the generalizations and vague writing about the 'gradual process' of development. It is difficult for me to traverse the arguments of Gneist, Stubbs and Freeman, because we consider the subject from such wholly different standpoints. For them the introduction of knight service means the process of sub-infeudation on the several fiefs; for me it means the grant of fiefs to be held from the crown by knight service. Thus the process which absorbs the attention of the school whose views I am opposing is for me a matter of mere secondary importance. The whole question turns upon the point whether or not the tenants-in-chief received their fiefs to hold of the crown by a quota of military service, or not. If they did, it would depend simply on their individual inclinations, whether, or how far, they had recourse to sub-infeudation. It was not a matter of principle at all; it was, as Dr Stubbs himself put it, 'a matter of convenience',[59] a mere detail. What we have to consider is not the relation between the tenant-in-chief and his under-tenants, but that between the king and his tenants-in-chief: for this was the primary relation that determined all below it. The assumption that the Conqueror cannot have introduced any new principle in the tenure of land lies at the root of the matter. Assuming this, one must of course seek elsewhere for the introduction of knight service. Have not the difficulties of the accepted view arisen from its exponents approaching the problem from the wrong point of view? The tendency to exalt the English and depreciate the Norman element in our constitutional development has led them I think, and especially Mr Freeman, to seek in Anglo-Saxon institutions an explanation of feudal phenomena. This tendency is manifest in their conclusions on the great council:[60] it colours no less strongly their views on knight service. In neither case can they bring themselves to adopt the feudal standpoint or to enter into the feudal spirit. It is to this that I attribute their disposition to bring the crown face to face with the under-tenant--or 'landowner' as they would prefer to term him--and so to ignore, or at least to minimize the importance of the tenant-in-chief, the 'middleman' of the feudal system. Making every allowance for the policy of the Conqueror in insisting on the direct allegiance of the under-tenant to the crown, and thereby checking the disintegrating influence of a perfect feudal system, the fact remains what we may term the 'military service' bargain was a bargain between the crown and the tenant-in-chief, not between the crown and his under-tenants. It follows from this that so long as the 'baron' (or 'tenant-in-chief') discharged his _servitium