THE DOMESDAY BOOK 
that the claim was always admitted, when we remember the con- 
tinual fluctuation of feudal institutions. Naturally there may be found 
contradictory statements about a constitutional position so peculiar, at 
times far severed from its initiation and early growth. But as late as the 
reign of Edward II. the traditional faith was strong in the lieges of 
the two counties that they were insisting only on their rights when 
they contended that the service due to the king in war did not 
carry them beyond their own borders. The primary clauses of their 
petition are of unusual interest, in that they carry us back to the days 
when ancient Cumbria was held as a fief, owing allegiance now to Scot- 
land, again to England, but possessing the germs of an independence 
which were still potent after the lapse of more than two centuries. In 
the first place they showed the king the service due in war to his ances- 
tors, viz. that on his march to Scotland they should meet him ‘a la 
Rerecroiz sus Estaynmor’ and go in his vanguard as far as ‘la Marche 
de Solewathe,’ and on his return from Scotland they should take the 
‘reeregarde’ from Solway to the ‘Rerecroiz.’ They prayed him to ratify 
this, and that their service otherwise made on divers expeditions should 
not prejudice them. Also, they said, if it happen for the defence of the 
realm that he require their services within it, that he should pay their 
wages in their own country before they started. But perhaps the strongest 
claim of all, involving a local sovereignty resembling in some respects 
the equipment of a palatine state, was that they should be allowed to 
go to war or truce with the Scots, according as they judged it most 
agreeable to the king’s honour or their own profit, by the advice of his 
officers in those parts, without hindrance or challenge.’ 
In what way the defence of the Border county was undertaken and 
how the feudal incidence of rural and castle ward was applied to the 
tenurial system of cornage are vague questions, about which very little is 
absolutely known for the period under review. A reflected light shines 
from the other side of the Border line on Ranulf Meschin’s tenure of 
Carlisle and the lordship of Cumberland. It is on record that David 
king of Scots selected the English tenure as the model for his grant of 
the castle and land of Anandale to Robert de Brus—‘ that land and its 
castle, with all those customs which Randulf Meschin ever had in Carduil 
1 Tower Miscellaneous Rol, No. 459; Bain, Calendar of Documents, iii. 716. The later 
history of this tenure by Border service, as the obligation came to be called, would furnish an interest- 
ing chapter of itself. At the time of the Union a great uproar was caused in Cumberland and 
Westmorland on the claim, first put forth by James I. on the royal manors, that as the Border service 
had come to an end, the estates themselves held by that tenure had determined. A long and bitter 
struggle ensued between lords and tenants, which lasted through the greater part of the reign of James I. 
and Charles I. In Cumberland the tenants of the manor of Brampton entered into an agreement with 
lord William Howard in 1610, whereby they relinquished their claims to tenant right and accepted 
leases (Household Books of Lord William Howard, pp. xxxvii., 413, 425-7). But in the sister county of 
Westmorland the contention dragged its weary length through the Star Chamber for many years. Dr. 
Burn, who has printed several valuable documents connected with the dispute, such as royal proclamations 
and records of the court, was of opinion that the tenants gave their case away in not insisting that they 
held their estates by a ‘double tenure, viz. by Border service in particular, and moreover by the general 
military tenure by which all other tenants in capite were obliged’ (Nicolson and Burn, History of West- 
morland and Cumberland, i. 51-9). In this judgment the learned author of The Fustice of the Peace 
spoke as the lawyer and not as the historian. 
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