Becket had not shrunk from excommunicating a tenant in chief who had encroached upon the lands of Canterbury, and had protected against the royal courts a clerk named Philip de Brois who was charged with an assault upon a royal officer.
That grantee, the tenant-in-chief, has the right to demand from his sub-tenants, to whom he has given out fractions of his estate, the same dues that the king exacts from himself.
England, in short, was reorganized into a state of the continental type, but one differing from France or Germany in that the crown had not lost so many of its regalities as abroad, and that even the greater earls had less power than the ordinary continental tenant-in-chief.
