The Business of the Coiirt Baron. 381 



before it, at which a suitor, proud of his literary skill, has just 

 ostentatiously dusted over with sand the curious hieroglyphics 

 which represent his notes of the case now occupying the 

 court's attention, is the same as that littered to-day with our 

 host's nineteenth-century writing materials. 



In discussing the principal business which occupied the 

 Court Baron of the Stuart period, we must however be care- 

 ful to weed out whatever the great Land Act of the Restoration 

 had destroyed. Theoretically, all the military surroundings of 

 the feudal constitution had been swept away. Practically, this 

 was not entirely the case. The people had bargained with their 

 king to pay him an equivalent for his losses in the abolition of 

 the feudal incidents unnecessary to the land tenure of more 

 peaceful times. Consequently aids, primer, seisin, escheats, 

 marriages, wardships and petit sergeantry were all more or 

 less put an end to by this contract betwixt king and people. 

 What this king thus sold to his English subjects, George II. 

 about a century later made a free gift of to his Scotch subjects. 

 But in both instances many incidents of feudalism survived in 

 a modified form. Take for example one of the most famous, 

 viz. that of escheat. Even now the forfeited lands revert to the 

 king disburdened from the dower of the wife ; and though 

 the royal reversioner satisfies the creditor at whose suit the 

 outlawry is prosecuted, he does so de gratia and not de jure} 



So, too, in dealing with that special branch of escheat con- 

 cerned with the defects of heritable blood, the statute of Charles 

 II. did not abolish the ultimus hseres, but since that Act a 

 tacit understanding supported neither by judges' ruling nor 

 legislation has replaced the lord as such with the king. "When, 

 too, the peculiar political exigencies of the case arising in the 

 reign of George I. demanded severer legislation, there is no 

 doubt that the so-called Clan Act of that reign was framed 

 on the traditional lines of the old feudal escheat.^ 



Another example where a feudal incident was modified, 

 rather than abolished outright, to meet altered circumstances, is 

 the case of wardships. For some time past the judgments of the 



' Dalrymple, Essays, Tenures. '^ Itl-, Ibid. 



