imposing money-age, and of levying taxes at pleasure on the farms which the barons retained in their own hands [f]: he made some general professions of moderating fines: he offered a pardon for all offences; and he remitted all debts due to the crown: he required that the vassals of the barons should enjoy the same privileges which he granted to his own barons: and he promised a general confirmation and observance of the laws of King Edward. This is the substance of the chief articles contained in that famous charter [g]. [FN [e] Chron. Sax. p. 208. Sim. Dunelm. p. 225. [f] See Appendix II. [g] M. Paris, p. 38. Hoveden, p. 468. Brompton, p. 1021. Hagulstadt, p. 310.] To give greater authenticity to these concessions, Henry lodged a copy of his charter in some abbey of each county, as if desirous that it should be exposed to the view of all his subjects, and remain a perpetual rule for the limitation and direction of his government: yet it is certain, that, after the present purpose was served, he never once thought, during his reign, of observing one single article of it; and the whole fell so much into neglect and oblivion, that in the following century, when the barons, who had heard an obscure tradition of it, desired to make it the model of the great charter which they exacted from King John, they could with difficulty find a copy of it in the kingdom. But as to the grievances here meant to be redressed, they were still continued in their full extent; and the royal authority, in all those particulars, lay under no manner of restriction. Reliefs of heirs, so capital an article, were never effectually fixed till the time of Magna Charta [h]; and it is evident that the general promise here given, of accepting a just and lawful relief, ought to have been reduced to more precision, in order to give security to the subject. The oppression of wardship and marriage was perpetuated even till the reign of Charles II. And it appears from Glanville [i], the famous justiciary of Henry II., that in his time, where any man died intestate, an accident which must have been very frequent when the art of writing was so little known, the king, or the lord of the fief, pretended to seize all the movables, and to exclude every heir, even the children of the deceased: a sure mark of a tyrannical and arbitrary government. [FN [h] Glanv. lib. 2. cap. 36. What is called a relief in the Conqueror's laws, preserved by Ingulph, seems to have been the heriot; since reliefs, as well as the other burdens of the feudal law, were unknown in the age of the Confessor, whose laws these originally were. [i] Lib. 7. cap. 16. This practice was contrary to the laws of King Edward ratified by the Conqueror, as we learn from Ingulph, p. 91. But laws had at this time very little influence: power and violence governed every thing.]