In England also gratuitous military service was originally the condition of the feudal tenure of land, nor was anyone bound to serve the king for more than a certain number of days in the year, forty being generally the longest term. For all service in excess of the legal limit the king was obliged to pay; and in this way, and by the scutage tax, by which many tenants bought themselves off from their strict obligations, the principle of a paid military force was recognised from the time of the Conquest. But the chief stipendiary forces appear to have been foreign mercenaries, supported, not out of the commutation tax, but out of the king’s privy purse, and still more out of the loot won from their victims in war. These were those soldiers of fortune, chiefly from Flanders, Brabançons, or Routers, whose excesses as brigands led to their excommunication by the Third Lateran Council (1179), and to their destruction by a crusade three years later.[320] But the germ of our modern recruiting system must rather be looked for in those military contracts or indentures, by which from about the time of Edward III. it became customary to raise our forces: some powerful subject contracting with the king, in consideration of a certain sum, to provide soldiers for a certain time and task. Thus in 1382 the war-loving Bishop of Norwich contracted with Richard II. to provide 2,500 men-at-arms and 2,500 archers for a year’s service in France, in consideration of the whole fifteenth that had been voted by Parliament for the war.[321] In the same way several bishops indented to raise soldiers for Henry V. And thus a foreign war became a mere matter of business and hire, and armies to fight the French were raised by speculative contractors, very much as men are raised nowadays to make railways or take part in other works needful for the public at large. The engagement was purely pecuniary and commercial, and was entirely divested of any connection with conscience or patriotism. On the other hand, the most obviously just cause of war, that of national defence in case of invasion, continued to be altogether disconnected with pay, and remained so much the duty of the militia or capable male population of the country, that both Edward III. and Richard II. directed writs even to archbishops and bishops to arm and array all abbots, priors, and monks, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, for the defence of the kingdom.[322]