8 SELF-SUFFICING FARMING 



together of tlie rural population iu villages betrays the 

 agrarian partnership, as detached farmsteads and isolated 

 labourers' dwellings indicate the system by which it has 

 been supplanted. 



The relation of manors to village communities lies 

 beyond the present inquiry. Two theories explain the 

 origin of manorial rights and rights of common. The 

 legal theory, in its crudest form, is that the lord of the 

 manor is absolute owner of the soil of his manor, and that 

 all rights acquired over it by freeholders and copyholders 

 are acquired against him, and originate in his grant or 

 sufferance. The historical theory is that self-governing, 

 independent communities of freemen originally owned 

 the land in common, and were gradually reduced to 

 dependence by one of their members, who became the lord 

 of the soil. If the second theory is correct, the legal 

 position of the lord of the manor represents a series of 

 encroachments which transformed the Mark of freemen 

 into the Manor of villeins, and transmuted the customary 

 rights of the villagers over the wastes into I'ights of user 

 over the lord's soil. Questions like the origin and anti- 

 quity of manors, and the extent to which they prevailed 

 before the Norman Conquest, have been to a great degree 

 reopened by Mr. Seebohm's remarkable work,^ in which 

 the legal theory is practically supported by an historical 

 argument. But whether the relation of manors to village 

 communities represented encroachments by the lord or 

 advances by the serf, whether the rights of agrarian asso- 

 ciations underlay or were acquired against the manorial 

 rights of the feudal baron — whether, in other words, 

 the land-law of the noble was becoming the land-law of 



' The English Village Communitg, London, 1883. 



