Bracton: Thorne Edition: English. Volume 2, Page 240

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Volume 2, Page 240

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If a lord wrongfully defers or refuses to take his tenant's homage.

[002] Suppose a lord, bound to take the homage of his tenant, wrongfully delays or
[003] refuses it, fraudulently perhaps, so as not to be bound to warrant; the tenant may
[004] then be provided for in many ways. In the first place he is relieved of service, to
[005] which he is in no way bound unless his homage has been taken. And if it must
[006] [later] be taken as a result of plea and judgment, the lord will lose all arrears.
[007] Having offered his homage in the presence of witnesses in the county court or in
[008] the court of his lord, and having been categorically refused, the tenant, if he wishes,
[009] may attorn himself to the superior chief lord, and if he refuses his homage, to the
[010] next, and so from lord to lord until he reaches the king himself, who is the first
[011] lord of all [descending, and the last ascending] and the ultimate heir of all heirs.
[012] When the tenant has so attorned himself to a superior lord and the latter taken his
[013] homage the lord who refused it may henceforth claim neither service nor homage,
[014] [nevertheless he will be bound to warrant, once it is established that he wrongfully¹
[015] refused the homage,]² [for] service follows him to whom homage is done. ³<And what
[016] if the superior chief lord refuses the homage of the tenant when it is offered him,
[017] after the inferior lord has wrongfully refused it? Service will no more be done to him
[018] than to the inferior lord who ought to be mesne, and the same may be said of all other
[019] superior chief lords.> [It will be otherwise] if the tenant attorns himself to the
[020] superior chief lord without such justification or other sufficient reason. [If] the
[021] tenant does homage to a superior chief lord or to a stranger by coercion of distress
[022] and against his will and the true lord claims it, the tenant may not withdraw,
[023] without judgment, from him to whom he has done homage.⁴ In that case, when the
[024] true lord demands of his tenant ‘that he do him the customs and right services he
[025] ought to do him from the free tenement he holds of him in such a vill, as in homages,
[026] reliefs, rents etc.,’⁵ or ‘that he do him homage and relief from that fee etc.,’⁶ when
[027] such [tenant] appears he may either acknowledge⁷ that he ought to hold that fee of
[028] him, and would willingly do him homage and service if he could withdraw from the
[029] lord who took his homage by coercion of distress, or utterly disavow⁸ the true lord,
[030] saying that he holds nothing of him.⁹ If he avows him, as aforesaid, let the superior
[031] chief lord or the non-lord stranger then be summoned to appear on a certain day to
[032] show ‘what right he claims in the homage and service of the aforesaid tenant by
[033] reason of an inheritance which belonged to the ancestor of the same tenant in such
[034] a vill, whence such a one (the true lord, that is)

Notes

1. ‘iniuste’

2. Infra 244, iv, 216

3. Supra i, 383

4. Supra 233

5. Glanvill, ix, 9; infra iv, 51

6. Infra 241

7. ‘aut cognoscat’

8. ‘deadvocat’

9. The portion infra 241, nn. 1-2, falls here