Talk:Knight's fee

Rewrite

This article has been re-written in haste to meet with a basic level of accuracy, which it was lacking. The text as it stood was positively misleading, therefore of disservice to readers. A knight's-fee is not an amount of money payable by a knight as rent but a feudal unit of landmass. What text was salvageable has been moved here below, its accuracy has not been assessed as no sources are given, but it can of course be reinstated if such are provided. Much of this article confused the topics of the knight's-fee with knight-service and the latter's related topic scutage, and such confused text has been removed. Salvaged text follows:

"The typical knight's fee was around £20 per year circa 1200. £20 is 30 marks, a monetary unit equal to 2⁄3 of a pound commonly used for assessing taxes, paying ransoms, and other such official usage. The derivation of the amount probably comes from a minor mediæval obsession with the number three, based on the Holy Trinity: the three estates, the Church, the nobility, and the peasantry; taxation and fees assessed by thirds — the 'third penny' going to the Crown or local lord — and so on. A free peasant paid for field work around the same period could expect around 3d per day, or a much as £3-4 in a year, meaning that a knight's fee was about three to five times more than a peasant's average income."(Lobsterthermidor (talk) 16:26, 24 November 2010 (UTC))