KNIGHT-SERVICE (servitium militare), and in law French chivalry, a species of feudal tenure. The knights created by this tenure differed most essentially from the knights of chivalry, though the difference seems not to have been accurately attended to by authors. The one class of knights was of a high antiquity, the other was not heard of till the invention of a fee. The adorning with arms and the blow of the sword made the act of the creation of the ancient knight; the new knight was constituted by an investment in a piece of land. The former was the member of an order of dignity which had particular privileges and distinctions; the latter was the receiver of a feudal grant. Knighthood was an honour, knight-service a tenure. The first communicated splendour to an army, the last gave it strength and numbers. The knight of honour might serve in any station whatever, the knight of tenure was in the rank of a soldier. By the tenure of knight-service the greater part of the lands in England were holden, and that principally of the king in capite, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and it was created, as Sir Edward Coke expressly testifies, for a military purpose, viz. for defence of the realm by the king's own principal subjects, which was judged to be much better than to trust to hirelings or foreigners. The description here given is that of knight-service proper, which was to attend the king in his wars. There were also some other species of knight-service, so called, though improperly, because the service or render was of a free and honourable nature, and equally uncertain as to the time of rendering as that of knight-service.
proper, and because they were attended with similar fruits and consequences. Such was the tenure by grand serjeanty, per magnum servitium, whereby the tenant was bound, instead of serving the king generally in his wars, to do some special honorary service to the king in person, as to carry his banner, his sword, or the like, or be his butler, champion, or other officer, at his coronation. It was, in most other respects, like knight-service, only he was not bound to pay aid or escuage; and when tenant by knight-service paid five pounds for a relief on every knight's fee, tenant by grand serjeanty paid one year's value of his land, were it much or little. Tenure by cornage, which was to wind a horn when the Scotch or other enemies entered the land, in order to warn the king's subjects, was, like other services of the same nature, a species of grand serjeanty.
These services, both of chivalry and grand serjeanty, were all personal, and uncertain as to their quantity or duration. But the personal attendance in knight-service growing troublesome and inconvenient in many respects, the tenants found means of compounding for it, by first sending others in their stead, and in process of time making a pecuniary satisfaction to the lords in lieu of it. By the degenerating of knight-service, or personal military duty, into escuage or pecuniary assessments, all the advantages, either promised or real, of the feudal constitutions were destroyed, and nothing but the hardships remained. Instead of forming a national militia composed of barons, knights, and gentlemen, bound by their interest, their honour, and their oaths, to defend their king and country, the whole of this system of tenures now tended to nothing else but a wretched means of raising money to pay an army of occasional mercenaries. The military tenures, with all their heavy appendages, were at length destroyed at one blow, by the statute 12 Charles II. c. 24; a statute which was a greater acquisition to the civil property of this kingdom than even magna charta itself, since that only pruned the luxuriances which had grown out of the military tenures, and thereby preserved them in vigour; but the statute of King Charles extirpated the whole, and demolished both root and branches.