[Illustration: AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURES TO WINDSOR AGREEMENT]
It was also an innovation upon accepted practice that the Conqueror extended to ecclesiastical estates the military responsibilities which he imposed upon lay fiefs. Long before the Confessor’s time, the churches had been subletting land to their thegns on condition that the latter should do the military service which the said churches owed to the king; but the duty in question merely represented the amount of fyrd service due from the lands of each religious house, and was in no sense the result of any bargain between the king and the latter. On the other hand, the number of knights maintained by an ecclesiastical tenant of King William depended in the last resort upon the terms which that tenant, whether bishop or monastery, had made with the new sovereign. The Conqueror could not venture to dispossess a native religious house as he could dispossess a native thegn or earl; but he could insist that such a body should make its contribution towards the new army which he was planting on the soil of England, and he could determine the minimum amount of the contribution in each case. So far as our evidence goes, the knight service demanded from a monastery was fixed in a much more arbitrary manner than that imposed on a lay tenant; a baron’s military liabilities would greatly correspond in the main, though very roughly, with the extent of his fief, but no principle of the kind can have been applied to the burden laid upon the church lands. The abbeys of Peterborough and Abingdon were bound to supply sixty and thirty knights respectively, but St. Albans escaped with a _servitum debitum_ of six, and St. Benet of Hulme was only debited with three. It is more than probable that political conditions went far towards producing these violent discrepancies; a monastery, like Peterborough, which had displayed strong nationalist tendencies, might fairly enough be penalised by the imposition of a heavy burden of service towards the maintenance of the foreign rule. On the other hand, the process in question was regarded in a very different light by the Norman abbots who were gradually introduced in the course of the reign, and by the English monks placed under their government. To the former the creation of knights’ fees meant a golden opportunity of providing for their necessitous kinsmen beyond the Channel; to the latter the withdrawal of land from the immediate purposes of the church forboded an ultimate shrinkage in the daily supply of beef and beer. The local chronicler of Abingdon abbey tells us sorrowfully how Abbot Ethelhelm sent over into Normandy for his kinsmen, and invested them with the possessions of the monastery to such an extent that in one year he granted seventy manors to them, which were still lacking to the church a hundred years later.