6 History of the English Landed Interest. 



of communal land tenure on the open tracts of pasturage and 

 plough field. 



Nomadic habits seem to have lingered on and become 

 intermixed with the rude beginnings of Feudalism and 

 common field agriculture. The kempery men, or standing 

 army, under its leader, the toisech, claimed support from the 

 creaghts, or wandering herdsmen, who moved their cattle over 

 the hilly pastures of different lordships, paying a seignorial 

 due in turn to each proprietor of the herbage from which 

 their livestock obtained a temporary means of existence. The 

 customary seignorial due, a gift of the best beast, on the death 

 of one of these " can-finnys," or free tenants, to the lord, re- 

 minds us of the Danish heriot. The king also claimed his rent 

 in kind ; and the head men, who corresponded to the tenants 

 in capite on the other side of St. George's Channel, in turn 

 received sorren, or chief rent, from their subordinates. The 

 origin of this sorren recalls to mind partly the incident of 

 purveyance, partly the fyrdbote of the Trinoda Necessitas; 

 for at first it consisted of the night's meal demanded as a right 

 by troops on active service, whilst passing through the tribal 

 lands. Mr. Cochran Patrick, from whose interesting work on 

 Mediaeval Scotland^ we have extracted much of the above 

 information, states that the support of the kempery men by 

 the creaghts lingered on to the times of which we are now 

 treating ; and it can be readily imagined how formidable to 

 the English this facile method of replenishing the mihtary 

 commissariat must have been in the struggle between the 

 dethroned James and William of Orange. Indeed, several of 

 the old customs, prohibited by law during the middle ages, 

 were revived to meet the crisis which arose after the confis- 

 cations of the seventeenth century ; and, as we shall shortly 

 show, the defeated leaders of the Jacobite army resorted for a 

 livelihood to the old tribal custom of cosherie, which entitled 

 the visiting Ri to board and lodging in the homes of his vassals. 



During the earlier centuries of the Christian era, the undu- 

 lating plain of rough herbage^ terminating towards the coasts 



^ Cochran Patrick's Mediaeval Scotland, c. i., and Appendix. 



^ It is not to be understood that there was no arable land ; corn and 



