Seig7torial Powers. 65 



munal rights to those of the overlord for the latter to have lost 

 the magisterial powers which were invested in him under his 

 old office of paterfamilias, and on the other hand not suf&cientl}' 

 forward in the evolutionary stage of landownership to find 

 those plenary powers over the soil to which the later English 

 owners of real property attained. Being far more the owner 

 of the people than of the people's land, he was less trammelled 

 in the management of the former than of the latter. By the 

 time he ceased to be ex officio a judge, he had established such 

 prescriptive rights of land ownership, that no champion of the 

 masses ventured to dispute his title. "When, as late as the 

 Tudor period, he attempted to alter the stains quo, he raised a 

 bloody tumult. Even to-day there are parts of the English 

 soil where he is quite content if he can but retain the limited 

 rights which he already possesses. 



"We have said that the lord was far more owner of his people 

 than of the lands constituting the limits of his seignorial 

 powers ; but we must not understand by this expression that 

 all the people of the tun were in the condition of a Roman 

 slave. Some there were who ranked as the lord's goods and 

 chattels, others performed their allotted tasks by certain fixed 

 customs, and a few even thus early were what "Vinogradoff 

 has defined as free agents bound by contract. There are some 

 who have imagined that the first-mentioned grade of servile 

 economy represents the primary condition of the whole com- 

 munity under the manorial system ; but that is an untenable 

 position when we come to examine closely the records that 

 exist of popular claims on certain portions of the manorial 

 lands, not only advanced by the people, but continually recog- 

 nised by the seignorial owners throughout the periods of 

 Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval land legislation. 



It is clear, then, that this peculiar relationship between lord, 

 people, and land called for the private court, just as much as 

 the relationship between nation and constitution called for the 

 public court. As that relationship altered, a reconstruction of 

 the various tribunals was not only necessitated, but took place. 



It is hard for a modern reader in these days of cramped land 

 ownership to realise a condition of affairs where a district was 



