20 History of the English Landed Interest. 



ill England, unless we waited to see if a like s^'stem were not 

 common to other peoples of the human race. 



On the other hand, it would be unreasonable to ignore the 

 influences of Roman land tenure altogether. In spite of 

 Bishop Stubbs, we believe that the ^ Roman legal code has 

 formed the model for many of the laws in our English statute 

 book, that the Roman vocabulary has been the recruiting 

 ground of our Anglo-Saxon language ; and that the Roman 

 engineering genius has created lasting examples for our road- 

 makers and bridge-builders. Why then should not Roman 

 customs have entered largely into the composition of that base 

 on which has been reared our present system of English land 

 tenure ? 



We who live in these peaceful and enlightened days can 

 scarcely realise how exceptional it was for a nation at the be- 

 ginning of the Christian era to enjoy the blessings of security 

 to person and property, to travel on roads still the envy of our 

 modern highway surveyors, to live in comfortable and substan- 

 tial dwellings, and to cultivate arts and sciences which the 

 Greeks and Romans alone of European nationalities were 

 refined enough to appreciate. Yet all this was bestowed on 

 the British by the Roman occupation. 



Like the Greeks before them and the English after them, 

 the Romans possessed the gift of ruling conquered nationalities. 

 The secret of their success was no doubt the elasticity of their 

 system. Here in Britain they had Celts, Belgee, South Ger- 

 mans, and Romans to control; and, as we have already said, we 

 must not expect to find one uniform method adopted; indeed, 

 we could perhaps hardly exaggerate the modifications in their 

 methods of government occasioned by altered circumstances 

 or times. Moreover the Roman occupation lasted as long as 

 from the Norman conquest to the beginning of the Tudor 

 dynasty. Could those four centuries have had as little effect 



* Let us cite two instances amongst many. The Norman lawyer dis- 

 torted every grade of the villeinage into one common distinction, that of 

 the Roman slave ; and secondly', he applied the Eoman rule to the sub- 

 ject of bastardy, thereby falling on the horns of a dilemma by creating a 

 policy contrary to Church doctrine. 



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