[Footnote 2: 'The belief which has come down to us from Selden, and the antiquarian school, a belief which was hitherto universally received, that William I divided the English landed property into military fees, is erroneous, and results from the dating back of an earlier [? later] condition of things.'--GNEIST, _Const. Hist._, i. 129.] [Footnote 3: 'There can be no doubt that the military tenure, the most prominent feature of historical feudalism, was itself introduced by the same gradual process which we have assumed in the case of the feudal usages in general.'--STUBBS, _Const. Hist._, i. 261.] [Footnote 4: Stubbs, _C.H._, i. 260-1. So too Freeman.] [Footnote 5: Stubbs, _C.H._, i. 261.] [Footnote 6: _Ibid._, i. 298.] [Footnote 7: _Ibid._, i. 298, 301.] [Footnote 8: _Ibid._, i. 300.] [Footnote 9: _Select Charters_, p. 96.] [Footnote 10: _Norm. Conq._, v. 380.] [Footnote 11: _C.H._, i. 581.] [Footnote 12: _N.C._, v. 377; cf. _History of William II_, pp. 335, 337, 'The whole system, a system which logically hangs together in the most perfect way, was the device of the same subtle and malignant brain.'] [Footnote 13: _Ibid._, p. 374.] [Footnote 14: 'Si quis baronum meorum, comitum sive aliorum qui de me tenent, mortuus fuerit, heres suus non _redimet_ terram suam sicut faciebat tempore fratris mei, sed justa et legitima relevatione _relevabit_ eam.'] [Footnote 15: 'In that charter the military tenures are taken for granted. What is provided against is their being perverted, as they had been in the days of Rufus, into engines of oppression.'--_N.C._, v. 373.] [Footnote 16: _N.C._, v. 372; _C.H._, i. 261.] [Footnote 17: _N.C._, v. 373.] [Footnote 18: Palgrave, as Mr Freeman observes, 'strongly and clearly brought out the absence of any distinct mention of military tenures in Domesday'. Dr Stubbs more cautiously wrote: 'The wording of the Domesday Survey does not imply that in this respect the new military service differed from the old.' (_C.H._, i. 262.) Mr Freeman confidently asserts: 'Nothing is more certain than that from one end of Domesday to the other, there is not a trace of military tenures as they were afterwards understood.... We hear of nothing in Domesday which can be called knight-service or military tenure in the later sense.' (_N.C._, v. 370, 371.) Mr Hunt (_Norman Britain_) follows the same line, and Gneist, vouching Palgrave, Stubbs, and Freeman, repeats the argument. (_C.H._, i. 130.)] [Footnote 19: 'I spoke to Mr Falconberge to look whether he could out of Domesday Book give me anything concerning the sea and the dominion thereof' (1661).] [Footnote 20: _N.C._, v. 465.] [Footnote 21: _N.C._, v. 4.] [Footnote 22: _Ibid._, p. 42.]