The cartae baronum submitted to King Henry 11 in 1166 are a curiously neglected source in English history. Edited by Thomas Hearne in 1728 and by Hubert Hall in 1896 they were one of the bases of J. H. Round's paper on the Introduction of Knight Service published in 1891 Yet they have not been re-examined systematically in recent discussions of Round's famous thesis. Perhaps Round has seemed to squeeze them dry. Perhaps the cartae have not seemed particularly relevant to the lines which have been followed by Round's critics, for they provide only ancillary evidence in the debate about local ‘continuity’ between thegnly and knightly estates, and, since they were composed a century after the Norman Conquest, they seem to leave room for the argument that the quotas of knight-service of the late twelfth century arose, not artificially from some act of government, but through gradual growth in the century following the Conquest. Yet the cartae, with the Pipe Rolls, are the fundamentd source for this whole field of study. They establish the size of many quotas of military service, whether by direct statement or by permitting computation; they illustrate the attitudes both of the Crown and its tenants-in-chief towards military service; and they lead to questions about military service to which there is still no satisfactory answer. It is with the cartae, therefore, that this paper is first concerned.

Round's chief concern was to correlate the cartae with the information on scutage in the Pipe Rolls of Henry ll. The present objective is to correlate the information of both the cartae and the Pipe Rolls with the history of feudal tenements. For it is obvious enough that the military burdens laid on the tenants-in-chief of the Crown were bound to bear the mark of forfeiture, escheat, marriage, sale and all the other accidents, genealogical, economic, and political, which might befall in the descent of a great estate. Round was not concerned with this within the context of his argument, and for good reason; for he set out to refute the notion that the military service of the Norman period ‘developed in unbroken continuity from Anglo-Saxon obligations'.