Wardship and Marriage under Elizabeth I

In his delightful description of Elizabethan England, the Reverend William Harrison reminds us that “by the especial grace of God and bounty of our princes ... if any come hither from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land, they become so free in condition as their masters.” The diplomat Sir Thomas Smith, writing his description of the Commonwealth of England in the fifteen sixties, while he was en poste in France, had paid tribute likewise to the liberty of Englishmen. Feudalism, he tells us, involved the use of two kinds of bondmen: slaves bound in their person and villeins bound to the soil. “And of the first,” he goes on, “I never knew any in the realm in my time; of the second so few there be that it is not almost worth the speaking.” With this and other evidence before them, it is not surprising that historians have been inclined to see the decline of feudalism more or less keep pace with the decline of the Middle Ages. By the Tudor period, it would appear, the substance had gone out of feudalism though some of its shadows remained.