Variations on the feudal aid were collected in England, France, Germany and Italy during the Middle Ages, although the exact circumstances varied.
[9] The English kings after the Conquest exploited their rights to aids extensively, although Henry I promised in his coronation charter to respect custom in the amounts and times he collected them.
[10] Under Henry II, the royal government needed ever greater sums of money to operate, so it continued the practice of extorting the aids whenever possible for as much as possible.
[3] Chapter XII of Magna Carta dealt with aids, limiting the ones that the king could collect to the three customary ones unless the barons agreed to the imposition of non-customary ones.
These volumes are arranged by traditional counties and includes some examples that were not strictly aids Although gifts from vassals to lords happened in the German empire, they do not appear to have become compulsory nor have been institutionalized into formalized occasions when they were required.
[15] Evidence for feudal aids in the northern part of Italy is late, and the custom may have been introduced from France or Sicily.
[1] She also notes that although the classic view of the aid was that it was raised from holders of fiefs, in reality it was collected from peasants more often than from nobles.
[2] The earliest notations of feudal aids being collected do not imply a lord-vassal relationship, which makes some traditional aspects of their early history suspect.