j62 Constitutional History. [chap.
Influence of
territorial
loyalty»
Personal
experience.
Long life.
Hard wrork
In one point, that of military service, they exercised less direct
authority ; but in other respects they possessed more. Besides
their religious vantage-ground, they had a stronger hold on
inherited loyalty, and possessed longer and higher personal
experience. The ecclesiastical estates remained far more per-
manently in the hands of the prelates than the lay estates in
those of the lords. Many of the bishops possessed manors
which had been church lands from the time of the heptarchy ;
few of the lay lords could boast of ancestry that took them
back to the Norman Conquest without many changes of rank
and tenure. And in personal experience few of the barons
could compete with the prelates. The life of a lay lord in the
middle ages was, with rare exceptions, short and laborious :
the life of a great prelate, laborious as it was, was not liable to
be shortened by so many risks. Kings seldom lived to be old
men ; Henry I and Edward I reached the age of sixty-seven ;
and Elizabeth died in her seventieth year : until George II no
king of England lived over seventy. Simon de Montfort, ‘ Sir
Simon the old man,’ may have been over sixty when he died ;
the elder Hugh Ie Despenser was counted wondrously old,
a nonagenarian at sixty-four; the king-maker died a little
over fifty. But forty years of rule was not a rare case among
the prelates : William of Wykeham, Henry Beaufort, and
AVilliam Waynflete, all bishops, chancellors, and great poli-
ticians, filled the see of Winchester for a hundred and seventeen
years in succession ; Beaufort was forty-nine years a bishop ;
Arundel thirty-nine ; Bourchier fifty-one ; Kemp thirty-four ;
and all were men of some experience before they became
bishops. Like most medieval workers they all died in harness,
transacting business, hearing suits, and signing public docu-
ments until the day of their death. Both the early industry
of the barons, and the long-protracted labours of the prelates,
convey the lesson that life was not easy in the middle ages,
except perhaps in the monasteries, where the ascetic practices
and manual labour of early days no longer counteracted the
enervating influences of stay-at-home lives. They teach us, too,
how strange a self-indulgent idle king must have seemed in
XXI.]
Knighthood.
5<53
the eyes of men who were always busy, and how a king who
shunned public work must have repelled men who lived and
died before the world, whose very houses were courts and
camps.
477. The knights and squires of England, on a smaller scale, ʃfɪe body
η . . , . . . 1 ’ Ofknighte
and with less positive independence, played the same part as the and squires,
great lords ; their household economy was proportionately
elaborate ; their share in public work, according to their
condition, as severe and engrossing. There was much, more-
over, in their position and associations that tended to ally them
politically with the lords. They had their pride of ancient
blood and long-descended unblemished coat-armour ; they had
had, perhaps, as a rule, longer hereditary tenure of their lands
than those higher barons who bad played a more hazardous
game and won larger stakes. What attendance at court, the
chances of royal favour, high office, the prizes of war, were
to the great lord, the dignities of sheriff, justice, knight of the
shire, commissioner of array, were to the country gentleman.
He was in some points equal to the nobleman ; in blood,
knightly accomplishment, and educational culture, there was
little difference, and need be none ; the gentleman was brought
up in the house of the nobleman, but with no degrading sense of
inferiority, and with a thorough acquaintance with his character
and ways. He might have constituted, and perhaps in many
instances did constitute, an invaluable link of union betwixt
the baron and the yeoman.
In this class of gentry, including in that wide term all who Raiuctance
possessed a gentle extraction, the ‘ generosi,’ ‘ men of family, of smaller
worship, and coat-armour,’ are comprised both the knight, to become
whether banneret or bachelor, and the squire. The attempts of kmgtlts∙
the successive kings to enforce upon all who held land to
the value of a knight’s fee the obligation of becoming belted
knights seem to have signally failed; the fines and licences
by which men of knightly estate were allowed to dispense with
the ceremony of the accolade were more profitable to the crown
than any services which could be exacted from an unwilling
class ; and few became knights who were not desirous ` of