A HISTORY OF SURREY 



the Bishops of Winchester and Rochester, the Abbot of Battle and the 

 Prior of Lewes. Kingston was a more or less important market town, 

 owing to the river and the bridge. Sheen was a royal palace. Guild- 

 ford was the seat of a cloth manufactory, and perhaps sent heavy 

 agricultural goods and timber to London by the river, even before its 

 canalisation. Four at least of the religious houses were places of im- 

 portance, and the Cistercians of Waverley, the Benedictines of Chertsey, 

 the Austin canons of Merton and the Cluniacs of Bermondsey all formed 

 centres of learning and of industry. The first are named among those 

 who supplied the Florentines with wool in 1315. 



The feudal institutions of the county, the system in which de 

 Warenne and de Clare had been the great leaders under or in despite 

 of the king, offer a few curious features, the discussion of which will 

 fall more naturally under the description of the places for the tenure of 

 which the services were due. The knights' fees, whence knight service, 

 the servitium debitum^ was due, seem to have been not more than about 

 eighty in the county, or perhaps less, 1 and something near half of this 

 service was owed by the de Clares for their manors in the county, be- 

 longing to the Honours of Gloucester and of Clare. The Earl de Warenne 

 owed the services of perhaps sixty knights from his manors all over 

 England, but he was far inferior in his following in Surrey to the other 

 great baronial house. Centuries later, when the Armada was expected, 

 the county was only expected to furnish ninety-six ' demi-lances,' who 

 may be taken as equivalent to mounted men-at-arms, not much more 

 than the twelfth and thirteenth century muster. But besides the mili- 

 tary tenures there were in Surrey many curious tenures by serjeanty, or 

 service of one kind or another to the king and his household, which owe 

 their origin to the presence or neighbourhood of the court at Guildford 

 and at Windsor, and specially to the royal needs in sport in Windsor 

 Forest and its bailiwick in west Surrey. 



The military levy of the county distinct from the feudal levy, under 

 the general obligation to bear arms expressed by the statute of Win- 

 chester, amounted in practice to only a few hundreds. In 1322, when 

 the Scots were in Yorkshire and the whole realm of Edward II. seemed 

 to be crumbling away in ruin, the levy of Surrey and Sussex, apart 

 from the city of Chichester, was only 500 men. In 1339, when 

 Edward III. was beginning his French wars, he raised from Surrey 

 20 men-at-arms, 80 armed foot and 80 archers. But these 180 men 

 were really intended to be professional soldiers for a continued contest. 

 The modern county, raising men in the same proportion, should be able 

 to send 9,000 regular soldiers abroad on foreign service, for the popu- 

 lation was then somewhere about 25,000 to the present 1,500,000. 



1 The two lists in Testa de Nevill, 53-60, of the knights' fees in Surrey amount to 631*5- and 

 6$-% knights' services respectively. No knight service appears for Blechingley and the surrounding 

 manors of de Clare, nor for Dorking and some other manors of de Warenne. Yet some was probably 

 owing, for the Red Book mentions them as quorum servitia ignorantur. Blechingley is also recorded as 

 ' unknown ' in Testa de Net/ill. The Red Book return referred to and that of the Testa de Nevill were 

 probably drawn from one original, as Mr. Round has shown in his Commune of London, etc. 



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