ad attached themselves
to these great peers, who bore offices which we should call menial in
their households, and sent their children thither for education, were of
course ready to follow their banner in rising, without much inquiry into
the cause. Still less would the vast body of tenants and their
retainers, who were fed at the castle in time of peace, refuse to carry
their pikes and staves into the field of battle. Many devices were used
to preserve this aristocratic influence, which riches and ancestry of
themselves rendered so formidable. Such was the maintenance of suits, or
confederacies for the purpose of supporting each other's claims in
litigation, which was the subject of frequent complaints in parliament,
and gave rise to several prohibitory statutes. By help of such
confederacies parties were enabled to make violent entries upon the
lands they claimed, which the law itself could hardly be said to
discourage.[385] Even proceedings in courts of justice were often liable
to intimidation and influence.[386] A practice much allied to
confederacies of maintenance, though ostensibly more harmless, was that
of giving liveries to all retainers of a noble family; but it had an
obvious tendency to preserve that spirit of factious attachments and
animosities which it is the general policy of a wise government to
dissipate. From the first year of Richard II. we find continual mention
of this custom, with many legal provisions against it, but it was never
abolished till the reign of Henry VII.[387]

[Sidenote: Prevalent habits of rapine.]

These associations under powerful chiefs were only incidentally
beneficial as they tended to withstand the abuses of prerogative. In
their more usual course they were designed to thwart the legitimate
exercise of the king's government in the administration of the laws. All
Europe was a scene of intestine anarchy during the middle ages; and
though England was far less exposed to the scourge of private war than
most nations on the continent, we should find, could we recover the
local annals of every country, such an accumulation of petty rapine and
tumult as would almost alienate us from the liberty which served to
engender it. This was the common tenor of manners, sometimes so much
aggravated as to find a place in general history,[388] more often
attested by records during the three centuries that the house of
Plantagenet sat on the throne. Disseisin, or forcible dispossession of
fre