Tenant-in-chief

In medieval and early modern Europe the term tenant-in-chief (or vassal-in-chief), denoted a person who held his lands under various forms of feudal land tenure directly from the king or territorial prince to whom he did homage, as opposed to holding them from another nobleman or senior member of the clergy. The tenure was one which denoted great honour, but also carried heavy responsibilities as the tenants-in-chief were originally responsible for providing knights and soldiers for the king's feudal army.

Other names for tenant-in-chief were captal or baron, although the latter term came to mean specifically one who held in-chief by the tenure per baroniam, the feudal baron. The Latin term was tenens in capite;

In most countries allodial property could be held by laypeople or the church; however in England after the Norman Conquest, the king became in law the only holder of land by allodial title; thus all the lands in England became the property of the Crown. A tenure by frankalmoin, which in other countries was regarded as a form of privileged allodial holding, was in England regarded as a feudal tenement. Every land-holding was deemed by feudal custom to be no more than an estate in land whether directly or indirectly held of the king; absolute title in land could only be held by the king himself, the most anyone else could hold was a right over land, not a title in land per se. In England, a tenant-in-chief could enfief, or grant fiefs carved out of his own holding, to his own followers. The creation of subfiefs under a tenant-in-chief or other fief-holder was known as subinfeudation. The Norman kings, however, eventually imposed on all free men (i.e. those whose tenures were "freehold", that is to say for life or heritable by their heirs) who occupied a tenement a duty of fealty to the crown rather than to their immediate lord who had enfeoffed them. This was to diminish the possibility of sub-vassals being employed by tenants-in-chief against the crown.

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