hundred pounds annually. The value of the knight's fee must already have
been fixed at twenty pounds a year.

In the reign of William Rufus the abbot of Ramsey obtained a charter
which exempted his monastery from the service of ten knights due from it
on festivals, substituting the obligation to furnish three knights to
perform service on the north of the Thames--a proof that the lands of
that house had not yet been divided into knights' fees. In the next
reign, we may infer--from the favor granted by the King to the knights
who defended their lands _per loricas_ (that is, by the hauberk) that
their demesne lands shall be exempt from pecuniary taxation--that the
process of definite military infeudation had largely advanced. But it
was not even yet forced on the clerical or monastic estates. When, in
1167, the abbot of Milton, in Dorset, was questioned as to the number of
knights' fees for which he had to account, he replied that all the
services due from his monastery were discharged out of the demesne; but
he added that in the reign of Henry I, during a vacancy in the abbacy,
Bishop Roger, of Salisbury, had enfeoffed two knights out of the abbey
lands. He had, however, subsequently reversed the act and had restored
the lands, whose tenure had been thus altered, to their original
condition of rent-paying estate or "socage."

The very term "the new feoffment," which was applied to the knights'
fees created between the death of Henry I and the year in which the
account preserved in the _Black Book_ of the exchequer was taken, proves
that the process was going on for nearly a hundred years, and that the
form in which the knights' fees appear when called on by Henry II for
"scutage" was most probably the result of a series of compositions by
which the great vassals relieved their lands from a general burden by
carving out particular estates, the holders of which performed the
services due from the whole; it was a matter of convenience and not of
tyrannical pressure. The statement of Ordericus Vitalis that the
Conqueror "distributed lands to his knights in such fashion that the
kingdom of England should have forever sixty thousand knights, and
furnish them at the king's command according to the occasion," must be
regarded as one of the many numerical exaggerations of the early
historians. The officers of the exchequer in the twelfth century were
quite unable to fix the number of existing knights' fees.

It cannot even be