ABSTRACT
A good many subordinate holdings within lordships, and certainly many grants of revenue, may have been called fiefs from the start and so, perhaps, may some lordships. Urban landowners may well have shared collective obligations of some kind, but the military service owed by fiefs, or rather knights' fiefs, was much more real and burdensome. Historians refer to subjects of the kingdom as vassals much more frequently, often using "vassal" to translate homo or, in vernacular texts, horn. The idea that the assise enabled those whom historians call rear-vassals to attend the king's court for the first time seems to be derived from later rules of feudal jurisdiction. Both fiefs and other property could indeed be granted free of services in twelfth-century Jerusalem, but freedom from services in such grants may not have implied freedom from all obligations owed collectively to the kingdom — or to the town.
