BARON, BARONY. Sir Henry Spel man (Glossarium, 1626, voce Baro) re gards the word Baron as a corruption of the Latin vir: but it is a distinct Latin word, used by Cicero, for instance, and the supposition of corruption is therefore unnecessary. The Spanish word varon, and the Portuguese bardo, are slightly varied forms. The radical parts of vir and baro are probably the same, b and v being convertible letters, as we observe in the forms of various words. The word barones (also written berones) first occurs, as far as we know, in the book entitled De Bello Alexandrian (cap. 53), where barones are mentioned among the guards of Cassius Longinus in Spain ; and the word may possibly be of native Spanish or Gallic origin. The Roman writers, Cicero and Persius, use the word baro in a disparaging sense; but this may not have been the primary signification of the word, which might simply mean man.
But the word had acquired a restricted sense before its introduction into England, and probably it would not be easy to find any use of it in English affairs in which it denoted the whole male population, but rather some particular class, and that an eminent class.
Of these by far the most important is the class of persons who held lands of a superior by military and other honour able services, and who were bound to at tendance in the courts of that superior to do homage, and to assist in the various business transacted there. The proper designation of these persons was the Ba rons. A few instances selected from many will be sufficient to prove this point. Spelmau quotes from the Book of Ramsey a writ of King Henry I., in which he speaks of the Barons of the honour of Ramsey. In the earliest of the Pipe Rolls in the Exchequer, which has been shown by its late editor to belong to the thirty-first year of King Henry I., there Is mention of the barons of Blithe, mean ing the great tenants of the lord of that honour, now call the honour of Tickhill. Selden (Titles of Honour, 4to. edit. p. 275) quotes a charter of William, Earl of Gloucester, in the time of Henry II., which is addressed " Dapifero suo et om nibus basonibus suis et hominibus Francis et Anglia," meaning the persons who held lands of him. The court itself in which these tenants had to perform their ser vices is called to this day the Court Baron, more correctly the court of the Barons, the Curia Baronum.
What these barons were to the earls and other eminent persons whose lands they held, that the earls and those emi nent persons were to the king: that is, as the earls and bishops, and other great landowners, to use a modern expression, had beneath them a number of persons holding portions of their lands for certain services to be rendered in the field or in the court, so the lands which those earls and great people possessed were held by them of the king, to whom they had in return certain services to perform of pre cisely the same kind with those which they exacted from their tenants ; and as those tenants were barons to them, so were they barons to the king. But, in
asmuch as these persons were, both in property and in dignity, superior to the persons who were only barons to them, the term became almost exclusively, in com mon language, applied to them ; and when we read of the barons in the early his tory of the Norman kings of England, we are to understand the persons who held lands immediately of the king, and had certain services to perform in return.
Few things are of more importance to those who would understand the early history and institutions of England, than to obtain a clear idea of what is mean' by the word baron, as it appears in dm writers on the affairs of the first two cen turies and a half after the Conquest. They were the tenants in chief of the crown. But to make this more intelligible, we may observe that, after the Conquest, there was an actual or a fictitious assump tion of absolute property in the whole territory of England by the king. The few exceptions in peculiar circumstances need not here be noticed. The king, thus in possession, granted out the greatest portion of the soil within a few years after the death of Harold and his own es tablishment on the throne. The persons to whom he made these grants were, 1. The great ecclesiastics, the prelates, and the members of the monastic institutions, whom probably, in most instances, he only allowed to retain, under a different species of tenure, what had been settled upon them by Saxon piety. 2. A few Saxons, or native Englishmen, who in a few rare instances were allowed to pos sess lands under the new Norman master. 3. Foreigners, chiefly Normans, persons who had accompanied the king in his ex pedition and assisted him in obtaining the throne : these were by far the most nu merous class of the Conqueror's benefi ciaries. Before the fourteenth or fifteenth year of his reign the distribution of the lands of England had been carried nearly to the full extent to which it was designed to carry it'; for the king meant to retain in his own hands considerable tracts of land, either to form chows or parks for field-sports, to yield to him a certain an nual revenue in money, to be as farms for the provision of his own household, or to be a reserve fund, out of which here after to reward services which might be rendered to him. These lands formed the demesne of the crown, and are what are now meant when we speak of the ancient demesne of the crown.