Vassalage and Fiefdom Philip's later charters suggest that the royal government was beginning to use the idea of holding property in fief when dealing with lesser people or with the lesser properties of great men. From 1186, surviving royal charters making perpetual grants to laymen sometimes said that the property was to be held in feodum et hominagium ligium. In the many grants of land and rights in Normandy that the king made after 1203, the phrase in feodum et hominagium ligium became more or less standard. The point of this was not, it seems, that a charter which used the phrase would automatically convey fewer rights or more obligations than one which might be assumed to convey the full traditional rights of an alod or inheritance. Most of the Norman charters say that the lands conveyed were to be held according to Norman custom and were to owe the accustomed services. The grants in Normandy were more likely intended to stress the new obedience to the king owed by everyone in the newly conquered duchy. In 1218 and 1220 Philip made exchanges of property in which what he gave was to be held in feodum et hominagium ligium and what he received had belonged to his opposite number (who was also his subject) by hereditary right. In the second case the land that the king granted was to be held in the same way and with the same liberty that he had held it. The same purpose of securing an acknowledgement of political subordination may explain many of the more numerous conversions of alods into fiefs by other lords. On several occasions, usually when dealing with an inheritance which was doubtful, Philip's charters refer to properties as fiefs, that would probably not have been so described earlier. Other charters, however, that record other hard financial or territorial bargains that he drove, or homages that he secured, do not use the word. All those who revieved charters cannot have understood fiefdom in the same way. Perhaps the reason why Philip's later grants were more often made in feodum et hominagium ligium was that so many were of rents or small and humble properties that may have seemed politically insignificant. They did not need to be reminded of their duties of obedience. During the period, we begin to get indications that people envisaged something like what historians call a feudal heirarchy or heirarchy of tenure within France. This does not bear up to scrutiny. The most obvious form of heirarchy in lay society was the social heriarchy. One of Philip Il's registers seems to reger to this when it arranges its lists under the headings of counts and dukes, barons, castellans and vavassors. It would be wrong to assume that this represented a heirarchy of property or tenure. As the Livres de Jostice et de Plet later ponted out, dukes, counts, visicounts and barons could hold their land from each other. From the eleventh century, people who held land with what