Besides this feudal army bound to render suit and service at the call of its sovereign, the laws of the kingdom also required all men of fit age--between sixteen and sixty--to keep themselves furnished with arms, and made them liable to be called out _en masse_ in great emergencies. This was the _Posse Comitatus_, the force of the county, and was under the command of the sheriff. We learn some particulars on the subject from an assize of arms of Henry II., made in 1181, which required all his subjects being free men to be ready in defence of the realm. Whosoever holds one knight's fee, shall have a hauberk, helmet, shield and lance, and every knight as many such equipments as he has knight's fees in his domain. Every free layman having ten marks in chattels shall have a habergeon, iron cap, and lance. All burgesses and the whole community of freemen shall have each a coat of fence (padded and quilted, a _wambeys_), iron cap, and lance. Any one having more arms than those required by the statute, was to sell or otherwise dispose of them, so that they might be utilised for the king's service, and no one was to carry arms out of the kingdom. There were two great points of difference between the feudal system as introduced into England and as established on the Continent. William made all landowners owe fealty to himself, and not only the tenants _in capite_. And next, though he gave his chief nobles immense possessions, these possessions were scattered about in different parts of the kingdom. The great provinces which had once been separate kingdoms of the Saxon heptarchy, still retained, down to the time of the Confessor, much of their old political feeling. Kentish men, for example, looked on one another as brothers, but Essex men, or East Anglians, or Mercians, or Northumbrians, were foreigners to them. If the Conqueror had committed the blunder of giving his great nobles all their possessions together, Rufus might have found the earls of Mercia or Northumbria semi-independent, as the kings of France found their great vassals of Burgundy, and Champagne, and Normandy, and Bretagne. But, by the actual arrangement, every county was divided; one powerful noble had a lordship here, and another had half-a-dozen manors there, and some religious community had one or two manors between. The result was, that though a combination of great barons was powerful enough to coerce John or Henry III., or a single baron like Warwick was powerful enough, when the nobility were divided into two factions, to turn the scale to one side or the other, no one was ever able to set the power of the crown at defiance, or to establish a semi-independence; the crown was always powerful enough to enforce a sufficiently arbitrary authority over them all. The consequence was that there was little of the clannish spirit among Englishmen. They rallied round their feudal superior, but the sentiment of loyalty was warmly and directly towards the crown.