The name for a wide range of tenures in mediaeval times, by which men held land on condition of performing some definite personal service, other than knight-service, to the superior lord. The services demanded were weighty or frivolous, but the distinction made in England between grand and petty serjeanties is an invention of legal antiquarians.
Tenure by serjeanty was a form of land-holding in Medieval England (and is also used of similar forms in Continental Europe) under the feudal system, intermediate between tenure by knight-service and tenure in socage.
Serjeanties, as Miss Bateson has expressed it, "were neither always military nor always agricultural, but might approach very closely the service of knights or the service of farmers ... The serjeanty of holding the king's head when he made a rough passage across the Channel, of pulling a rope when his vessel landed, of counting his chessmen on Christmas day, of bringing fuel to his castle, of doing his carpentry, of finding his potherbs, of forging his irons for his ploughs, of tending his garden, of nursing the hounds gored and injured in the hunt, of serving as veterinary to his sick falcons, such and many others might be the ceremonial or menial services due from a given serjeanty." The many varieties of serjeanty were afterwards increased by lawyers classing for convenience under this head such duties as those of escort service to the abbess of Barking, or of military service on the Welsh border by the men of Archenfield. Sometimes, as in the case of three Hampshire serjeanties -- those of acting as king's marshal, of finding an archer for his service, and of keeping the gaol in Winchester Castle -- the tenure can be definitely traced as far back as Domesday. It is probable, however, that many supposed tenures by serjeanty were not really such, although so described in returns, in inquests after death, and other records.
The germ of the later distinction between "grand" and "petty" serjeanty is found in the Great Charter (1215), the king there renouncing the right of prerogative wardship in the case of those who held of him by the render of small articles. The legal doctrine that serjeanties were (a) inalienable and (b) impartible led to the "arrentation," under Henry III, of serjeanties the lands of which had been partly alienated, and which were converted into socage tenures, or, in some cases, tenures by knight-service. Gradually the gulf widened, and "petty" serjeanties, consisting of renders, together with serjeanties held of mesne lords, sank into socage, while "grand" serjeanties, the holders of which performed their service in person, became alone liable to the burden of wardship and marriage. 24), that of grand serjeanty was retained, doubtless on account of its honorary character, it being then limited in practice to the performance of certain duties at coronations, the discharge of which as a right has always been coveted, and the earliest record of which is that of Queen Eleanor's coronation in 1236.
The best summary of tenure by serjeanty is in Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law.
Serjeanty is to be distinguished from offices held hereditary in gross.
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