53 
“the fiefs themselves remained entire, capable of distinct con- 
sideration, so that this distribution made at the Conquest has 
been substantially maintained from that time to the present, and 
is in fact the origin of rights to land, rents and franchises as they 
exist at the present day.” 
Just as the great fees had passed away, the sub-fees, through 
division, were in many instances obscured and seemed to pass 
away also, until in succeeding generations we get down to what 
are now understood as manors, and sub-division has nominally 
gone no farther. It is, nevertheless, true that although these 
manots became independent units of lawyers and historians, 
although the great lord who had been known as the owner of a 
certain great fee, came to regard himself as the owner of a bundle 
of contiguous manors, it has never been forgotten by antiquaries 
that these manors still compose the great fee, and that the change 
is one of name more than of fact. There doubtless was utility in 
the change of form, and manors have sometimes been severed from 
their brethren in the great fee ; still the manors themselves have 
not been subject to sub-division, and our modern freeholders, free 
as they are, must be constitutionally regarded as holding of the 
manor. 
Having written the history of the great fee, or ascertained that 
it has been written by Dugdale or other of his classics, the 
topographer must now commence to write a history of each 
manor from its first development from out of the fee down to 
the present time. The manor is still one and indivisible, its 
owner wears the crown in the little succession, and although 
politician after politician, enthusiast after enthusiast, ‘sad lozel” 
after “sad lozel” forfeited or sold the fields until the manor is 
but a skeleton yielding no juicy income to its lord, the lord, 
known or unknown, remains, perhaps, a journeyman or perhaps 
a golddigger, but as true a sovereign within his limited right, 
and by the same law, as any of the large family who may now 
dine together at the ordinary at Venice. It was this little prince, 
