Given that he’s their liege lord, quite a bit, although it’s mediated by the terms of feudal service that have been codified either in writing or in tradition.
As for scutage…that’s not really something where you force someone to accept it. Scutage was a privilege that the liege lord allowed to their vassals in lieu of military service. However, when you impose scutage and how much you ask for per knight’s fee, would be something that the liege lord could do.
By contrast, feudal taxes tended to be fixed by writing or tradition – which is a big part of the reason why kings and liege lords turned to “feudal incidents,” fines, and privileges like scutage to raise their incomes in a hurry.
My perhaps erroneous understanding of scutage is that this could be very context-dependent based on the amount of scutage and whether or not there was an actual-factual stabbing war on, yes? No?
Like… King John’s vassals didn’t consider paying scutage to be a privilege they were allowed; they considered it an enormous burden because it was abnormally high and levied every year war or no war. Whereas in other times and circumstances, paying money to NOT run the risk of being killed on some muddy battlefield was indeed a great privilege.
Or am I completely off-base here?
Well, King John is a good example of how you turn a privilege into a burden, and then into tyranny. What I was getting at is that the idea of scutage wasn’t an innovation imposed from above, it was a normal part of feudalism that had developed in response to sub-infeudations that led to leases so small that the leaseholders couldn’t afford to go to war. And for those people, it was a privilege.
What changed it was that King John imposed scutage when he wasn’t at war – that was an innovation – and that he kept raising the amount-per-fee again and again. And then you get Runnymeade (doo dah doo dah) and scutage gets regulated in written form.
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