ABSTRACT
In turn the great barons, the tenants-in-chief of the crown, transmitted on like conditions their military obligations to their own tenants. But in an age of war and plague and sudden death it frequently happened that the tenant died leaving as heir a child, who was manifestly unable to render the appropriate military service. The unassuageable appetites of war, diplomacy, administration and extravagance drained the royal exchequer. The official valuation tended to be lower than the market price, and lower than the price at which the land was subsequently re-sold; but it was as high as the traditional methods of estimation would allow. It was, of course, quite fantastic to call up a Norman system of government for so totally irrelevant a purpose as the sale of monastic lands, nearly five centuries after the Norman army had taken England by force. The hostility to the extreme powers now vested by the statute in the crown was widespread.
