The exactions and usurpations of the Crown were of the most various kinds, and affected every class of society. Reliefs of arbitrary and unreasonable amount were again, as in the Red King’s days, exacted from tenants-in-chief on succession to their estates.[948] Sub-tenants holding land which formed part of an escheated honour were made to pay relief not as other sub-tenants paid to their immediate lord, but as if they held in chief of the Crown.[949] The widows of tenants-in-chief could not obtain the dowry to which they were legally entitled without payment to the king for its assignment,[950] and were forced into second marriages against their will.[951] The wardship and marriage of minor heirs was given, or sold, by the king to his friends without regard to the honesty or dishonesty of the guardian and the interests of the minor and his family.[952] By an ingenious piece of intentional confusion the Crown arrogated to itself the right of wardship in cases where it had no such right. If a man held land of the Crown by a non-feudal tenure, and also held other land under another lord by knight-service, the distinction between his holding in chief and his holding in chivalry was ignored for the king’s benefit, and the custody of all the man’s lands was appropriated to the Crown.[953] Distraints for debt to the Crown were made in the most arbitrary way; the king’s bailiffs would, if it so pleased them or their master, seize a debtor’s land instead of his chattels, though the value of these latter sufficed to discharge his debt; or they would distrain a debtor’s sureties, although he himself was able to pay.[954] When a freeman died, they assumed as matter of course that he was in debt to the king, and without inquiring to what amount, they seized his chattels, to be restored to his executors or next-of-kin only when the royal claim was satisfied, and not always then.[955] John, like William Rufus, “would be every man’s heir.” If a man died in debt to the Jews, and leaving an heir under age, those usurers were suffered to exact interest upon their debt during the minority of the heir, so that if through the death of the Jewish creditor the debt should fall into the king’s hand (the Crown being the legal heir of all Jews), there should be as much for the king as possible; and in such cases he claimed payment of the uttermost farthing that was set down in the Jew’s account-book, although he might thereby leave the Christian debtor’s widow and children to starve.[956] Exorbitant tolls were exacted from merchants.[957] Fines were laid upon towns for the making of bridges, in places where no such obligation had existed in times past.[958] Weirs were placed in the rivers that the king might keep to himself the profits of fishing.[959] Monasteries not of royal foundation were taken into the king’s custody during vacancy, in defiance of the rights of their founders’ representatives.[960] The king’s bailiffs compelled