2 2 History of the English Landed Interest. 



defined before we can properly examine the question of liis 

 origin in this island. He was probably some individual who 

 managed to combine in his own person the offices of judge, fiscal 

 officer, and landed proprietor. The officials of the Fiscus, we 

 are told by Tacitus, ^ though unsuccessful with Tiberius, ulti- 

 mately obtained from Claudius a recognition of their claims to 

 judicial power. The third qualification i.e., proprietary rights 

 over land, alone was wanting, and to attain that they had to 

 supply capital as an equivalent for the sj^stem of coaration, 

 probably then in use, and to become bound by certain social 

 regulations and duties towards their serfs, to which modern 

 times can afford no parallel. 



AVhether then this combination of powers, which under 

 Anglo-Saxon rule were known as sac, soc, toll, and team, ever 

 endowed some individual of the British era with the same pro- 

 l^rietary rights which afterwards made the king's thane and 

 the Norman baron such alarming personages, is doubtful. 

 There is, however, little likelihood that the overlord of this 

 early period, be he Roman or Briton, survived the Saxon's 

 sword, any more than his villa survived the invader's destruc- 

 tive tendencies. It is enough if we point out that the manorial 

 system was not unknown to the Roman. The Fundus of the 

 later republican and imperial times owned by a landlord and 

 worked by his servi and coloni, was not dissimilar to the provin- 

 cial manor, and Mr. Gomme "^ has gone so far as to produce 

 evidence of a British resistance to the growing powers of over- 

 lordship, which not even in Rome had been allowed free play. 

 But for the present we have cited sufficient instances of close 

 parallels between Roman and Anglo-Saxon systems of land 

 tenure and agriculture, and are leaving to the Feudal period, 

 perhaps, the closest of any, viz. that of the colonus with his 

 military service and emphyteutic tenure. So far it is impos- 

 sible to form any positive conclusions, for we have yet to 

 compare the Anglo-Saxon systems with those of the Teuton, 

 the Sclav, and other distinctive branches of the human race. 



' Tacitus, Annales, xii. GO. 



- Fustel de Coulanges, Property in Land, p. 9. Gomme, Village Com- 

 mnnitij, p.lGl. 



