102 ON SOME ANCIENT BURTON MANUSCRIPTS. 
were only undertaken by “freemen.” Other tenancies, such as 
those by which a tenant held land by the tenure of ploughing land 
for his lord, or finding him manure, were called “ base” tenures. 
But to return to our system of tenure by “ knight-service.” 
When I speak of a system of tenures, I do not wish to be under- 
stood as meaning that anyone, as it were, invented an actual 
system, and it was brought into use by Act of Parliament, com- 
mencing on a certain day, so to speak. No; this was the system 
into which use, habit, and other circumstances gradually 
fashioned the tenure of land in those days. 
This system seems to have worked well enough so far as 
the rendering of the rent service went. Suppose, for instance, 
the Crown engaged in a war; it would call on its vassal A, 
and A would call on D, E, and F, and they on their vassals, 
and so on. In this respect the plan seems to have worked 
well. But as time went on the class of ‘‘mesne lords” 
began to increase. It began to be seen that it was a good 
thing to be an overlord, and so vassals would let off their 
land to vassals of their own, and so became overlords, or, as 
they came between the chief lord and the lowest vassal, they were 
called “mesne lords,” meaning “middle lords.” For instance, as in 
the plan, D, who was vassal to A, would himself become an over- 
lord, and would, consequently, become entitled, not only to the 
rent-service, which was nothing much, as it were, but also to those 
valuable incidents which I have spoken of, and would, as it were, 
intercept them from A, the chief lord of the fee. In fact we have 
here a phase of a question which troubles us occasionally now; I 
mean the question of the ‘‘ middleman,” the trader who comes 
-between the wholesale dealer and the consumer, and intercepts 
part of the profits or raises prices. Of course the process of sub- 
infeudation went on gradually, and it was some time before the 
chief lords began to find out that their rights were being inter- 
cepted by the creation of ‘‘mesne lords.” Now, naturally, the 
chief lords objected to this excessive sub-infeudation, or sub-letting 
of the land, and matters had reached such a pitch that about 200 
years after the Conquest, in the year 1290, an Act of Parliament 
