Freedom In Service / Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government

e understood the duty of every freeman to respond in person to the summons to arms, to equip

tition, to give three parallel quotations from English authorities. Grose, in his Military Antiquities, says: "By the Saxon laws every freeman of an age capable of bearing arms, and not incapacitated by any bodily infirmity, was in case of a foreign invasion, internal insurrection, or other emergency obliged to join the army."[4] Freeman, in his Norman Conquest, speaks of "the right and duty of every free Englishman to be ready for the defence of the Commonwealth wi

l one. It had no relation to the possession of land; in fact it dated back to an age in which the folk was still migratory and without a fixed territory at all. I

us "Assize of Arms" ends with the words: "Et praecepit rex quod nullus reciperetur ad sacramentum armorum nisi liber homo."[8] A summons was a right quite as much as a duty. The English were a brave and martial race

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s a pamphlet by the National Servi

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patri? omnes sine ulla excusatione veniant." (Let all wi

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Norman Conquest,

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Art of War in the

The King orders that no one except a free