FEUDAL SYSTEM. 



FEVER, CONTINUED. 



58 



[FiNE.] By 32 Henry VIII. c. 28, tenants in tail were enabled to 

 make leases for three lives or twenty-one years, which should bind 

 their issue. The 26 Heury VIII. c. 13, also, had declared all estates 

 of inheritance, in use or possession, to be forfeited to the king upon 

 any conviction of high treason, and thus destroyed one of the strongest 

 inducements to the tying up of estates in tail, which hitherto had only 

 been forfeitable for treason during the life of the tenant in tail. 



Another mode by which the feudal restraints upon voluntary 

 alienation came at length to be extensively evaded was the practice 

 introduced, probably about the end of the reign of Edward III., of 

 granting lands to persons to uses, as it was termed ; that is, the new 

 owner of the land received it not for his own use, but on the under- 

 standing and confidence that he would hold the land for such persons 

 and for such purposes as the grantor then named or might at any time 

 afterwards name. Thus an estate in land came to have two qualities 

 or natures, so to speak, one of which was the legal ownership, and the 

 other the right to the profits or the use ; and this use could be trans- 

 ferred by a man's last will at a, time when, the laud itself being still 

 bound in the fetters of feudal restraint, could not be transferred by 

 will, except where it was devisable, as in Kent and some other parts of 

 England, by special custom. The person who thus obtained the use 

 or profits of the estate the cesttii que use, as he is called in law was 

 Anally converted into the actual owner of the land to the same amount 

 of interest as he had in the use (A.D. 1535) by the Statute of Uses 

 <27 Hen. VIII. c. 10), and thus the power of devising land which 

 had been enjoyed by the mode of uses was taken away. But this 

 important element in the feudal system, the restraint on the dis- 

 >n of lands by will, could no longer be maintained consistently 

 with the habits and opinions then established, and accordingly, by 

 stat. 32 Hen. VIII. (explained by 34 Hen. VIII.), all persons were 

 allowed to dispose of their freehold lands held in fee-simple by a will 

 in writing, subject to certain restrictions as to lands held by knight 

 service either of the king or any other, which restrictions were 

 removed by the stat. ^12 Chas. II. c. 24, which abolished military 

 tenures. [USES.] 



Notwithstanding these successive assaults upon certain parts of the 

 ancient feudalism, the main body of the edifice still remained almost 

 entire. It is said that the subject of the abolition of military tenures 

 was brought before the parliament in the 18th of James I., on the 

 king's recommendation ; but at that time nothing was done in the 

 matter. When the civil war broke out in 1641, the profits of marriage, 

 wardship, and of most of the other old feudal prerogatives of the 

 crown, were for some time still collected by the parliament, as they 

 had formerly been by the king. The fabric of the feudal system in 

 England, however, was eventually shattered by the storm of the great 

 rebellion. The Court of Wards was hi effect discontinued from 1645. 

 The restoration <>f the king could not restore what had thus been in 

 practice swept away. By the above-mentioned statute (12 Car. II. 

 c. !4) it was accordingly enacted, that from the year 1645 the Court of 

 Wards and Liveries, and all wardships, liveries, primer-seisins, values, 

 and forfeitures of marriage, &c., by reason of any tenure of the king's 

 majesty, or of any other by knights' tenures, were taken away and dis- 

 charged, together with all fines for alienations, tenure by homage, 

 eacoage, aids pur file inarrier and pur fair fitz chevalier, &c. ; and that 

 all tenures of any honours, manors, lands, tenements or hereditaments, 

 or any estate of inheritance at the common law, held either of the king 

 or of any other person or persons, bodies politic or corporate, were 

 turned into free and common soccage, to all intents and purposes. 

 V'JE.] By the same statute, every father was empowered by deed 

 or will, executed in the presence of two witnesses, to appoint persons 

 to have the guardianship of his infant and unmarried children, and to 

 have the custody and management of their property. It was not till 

 after the lapse of nearly another century that similar incidents of 

 feudalism were put an end to hi Scotland by two statutes, passed after 

 the Rebellion, the 20 Geo. II. c. 43, entitled ' An Act for abolishing 

 Heritable Jurisdictions;' and the 20 Geo. IL c. 50, entitled ' An Act 

 for taking away the Tenure of Wardholding in Scotland.' It is only 

 within the last few years that estates-tail in Scotland have been relieved 

 from the strictest fetters of a destination in perpetuity. 



We have enumerated the principal statutes which may be considered 

 as having broken in upon the integrity of the feudal system, considered 

 in reference to the power which the tenant of land can now exercise 

 over it, and the right which others can enforce against him in respect 

 of his property in it. But the system of tenures still exists. The 

 statute of Charles II. only abolished military tenures and such parts of 

 the feudal system as had become generally intolerable ; but all lands in 

 the kingdom are still held either by soccage tenure, into which military 

 tenures were changed, or else by the respective tenures of frankal- 

 moyne, grand serjeanty, and copyhold, which were not affected by the 

 statute. 



Some of the consequences of tenures, as they at present subsist, can- 

 not be more simply exemplified than by the rules as to the FORFEITURE 

 .-ICHEAT of lands, both of which, however, have undergone modi- 

 <na since the statute of Charles II. 



To attain a comprehensive and exact view of the present tenures of 



Tty in England and their incidents and consequences, it 



would be necessary for the reader to enter upon a course of study more 



laborious and extensive than in consistent with pursuits not strictly 



legal. Still a general notion may be acquired of their leading charac- 

 teristics by referring to several of the articles already quoted, and to 

 such heads as ATTAINDER, BARON, COPYHOLD, COURTS, DISTRESS, 

 ESTATE, LEASE, MANOR, TENURES, and such other articles as may be 

 referred to in those last mentioned. 



The notions of loyalty, of honour, of nobility, and of the importance, 

 socially and politically, of landed over other property, are the most 

 striking of the feelings which may be considered to have taken their 

 birth from the feudal system. These notions are opposed to the ten- 

 dency of the commercial and manufacturing spirit which has been the 

 great moving power of the world since the decline of strict feudalism ; 

 but that power has not yet been able to destroy, or perhaps even very 

 materially to weaken, the opinions above mentioned in the minds of 

 the mass. 



We are not, however, to pass judgment upon feudalism, as the origi- 

 nating and shaping principle of a particular form into which human 

 society has run, simply according to our estimate of the value of these 

 its relics at the present day. The true question is, if this particular 

 organisation had not been given to European society after the dissolu- 

 lution of the ancient civilisation, what other order of things would in 

 all likelihood have arisen, a better or a worse than that which did 

 result? Some assistance in settling this question might perhaps be 

 obtained by comparing the history of society, from this date, iu the 

 feudal countries, with its history iu those parts of Europe to which 

 feudalism never reached, France or England, for instance, with Den- 

 mark, Sweden, or Hungary. 



As for the state of society during the actual prevalence of the feudal 

 system, it was without doubt in many respects exceedingly defective 

 and barbarous. But the system, with all its imperfections, still com- 

 bined the two essential qualities of being both a system of stability and 

 a system of progression. It did not fall to pieces, neither did it stand 

 still. Notwithstanding all its rudeness, it was, what every right system 

 of polity is, at once conservative and productive. And perhaps it is 

 to be most fairly appreciated by being considered, not in what it 

 actually was, but in what it preserved from destruction, and in what it 

 has produced. 



The earliest published compilation of feudal law was a collection of 

 rules and opinions supposed to have been made by two lawyers of 

 Lombardy, Obertus of Otto and Gerardus Niger, by order of the 

 Emperor Frederic Barbarossa. It appeared at Milan about the year 

 1170, and immediately became the great text-book of this branch of 

 the law in all the schools and universities, and even a sort of authority 

 in the courts. It is divided in some editions into three, in others into 

 five books, and is commonly entitled the ' Libri Feudorum ; ' the old 

 writers, however, are wont to quote it simply as the Textus, or Text. 

 But the great sources of the feudal law are the ancient codes of the 

 several Germanic nations ; the capitularies or collections of edicts of 

 Charlemagne and his successors ; and the various Coutumiers or col- 

 lections of the old customs of the different provinces of France. The 

 laws of the Visigoths, of the Burgundians, the Salic law, the laws of 

 the Alemanni, of the Baiuvarii, of the Ripuarii, of the Saxons, of the 

 Anglii, of the Werini, of the Frisians, of the Lombards, &c., have been 

 published by Lindenbrogius in his ' Codex Legum Antiquarum,' fol., 

 Francof., 1613. The best editions of the capitularies are that by 

 Baluze, in 2 vols. fol., Paris, 1677, and that by Chiniac, of which, how- 

 ever, we believe only the first two volumes have appeared, Paris, fol., 

 1780. Richebourg's ' Nouveau Coutumier Gc'ndral,' 4 vols. fol., Paris, 

 1724, is a complete collection of the Coutumiers, all of which, however, 

 have also been published separately. All these old laws and codes, as 

 well as the Milan text-book, have been made the subject of voluminous 

 commentaries. 



-FEVER, CONTINUED. Under the name fever are included 

 various diseases which are distinguished by some term prefixed to this 

 word, as scarlet fever, inflammatory fever, yellow fever, continued 

 fever, intermittent fever, remittent fever, and such like. There can 

 be little doubt that this term fever has been applied to very opposite 

 and different states of the system, and the only idea implied by the 

 word is a certain continuity in the disease, and perhaps a tendency in 

 the diseased processes to come to a natural termination. The term 

 fever is however frequently applied alone to that group of diseases to 

 which recent medical writers have applied the term " continued 

 fevers." This expression continued distinguishes them more espe- 

 cially from the fevers called intermittent [AGUE], remittent [HYDBO- 

 CEPHALUS], and yellow fevers. By some writers it is supposed that 

 the various forms of continued fever are but modifications of that same 

 state of the system in which intermittent, remittent, and yellow fevers 

 come on. There is however good reason to believe that ague and 

 remittent and yellow fevers arise from causes different from those 

 producing continued fevers. Hence they are now regarded as distinct. 

 Dr. Jenner, who has recently written on this subject, sums up the 

 forms of continued fever in the following manner. 



" febricuta A disease attended by chilliness, alternating with a 

 sense of heat, headache, white tongue, confined bowels, high-coloured 

 scanty urine, hot and dry skin, and frequent pulse, terminating iu 

 from two to seven days, and having for its cause excess, exposure, 

 over-fatigue, &c. (i.e.) the cause of febricula is not specific. 



" Relapsing Fever. A disease arising from a specific cause, attended 

 y- rigors and chilliness, headache, vomiting, white tongue, epigastric 



