4 THE MANORIAL SYSTEM 



rather than systems of cultivation. Two theories explain the rights 

 of manorial lords and rights of common exercised over manorial 

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

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

 acquired over any part of it by freeholders and tenants are acquired 

 against him, and originate in his grant or sufferance. The historical 

 theory, stated baldly, is that self-governing, independent com- 

 munities of freemen originally owned the land in common, and were 

 gradually reduced to dependence by one of their members, or by a 

 conqueror, who became the lord of the soil. There seems to be no 

 doubt that individual ownership belongs to an earlier stage of 

 civilisation than communal ownership. But 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 Mark of bondmen, and changed the rights of the villagers 

 over the wastes of the district into customary rights of user over 

 the lord's soil. Questions of the origin and antiquity of manors, 

 and the extent to which they prevailed before the Norman Conquest, 

 have been to a great degree reopened by recent studies. Seebohm, 

 for example, practically supported the legal view by historical 

 argument. He traced the feudal manor to the Roman villa, with 

 the lord's estate as the centre round which clustered cultivators, 

 who tilled the soil under servile or semi-servile conditions. This 

 system, according to his view, was taken over by the Anglo-Saxon 

 invaders, and the agrarian results of the Teutonic occupation may 

 be summed up hi the transfer of the Roman villa, with its servile 

 labourers, to the conquerors. As a complete explanation of social 

 development the legal theory, in spite of this historical support, 

 seems inadequate. But whether the early stages of village com- 

 munities reveal a movement from serfdom or originated in freedom, 

 whether their relations to manors represent encroachments by the 

 lord or advances by the serf, whether the rights of agrarian associa- 

 tions underlay, or were acquired against, the manorial rights of the 

 feudal baron whether, in other words, the land-law of the noble 

 became the land-law of the people, or the reverse is here immaterial. 

 Roughly and generally speaking, the immediate lordship of the land 

 farmed by a village community, including the wastes and commons, 

 was, after the Norman Conquest, vested in the lord of the manor, 

 subject to regulated rights enjoyed by its members. 



On a manorial estate, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, 



