84 History of the English Landed Interest. 



from a manor ; and that Mr. Percival Birkett has more recently 

 demonstrated^ that in Bracton's time there mnst have been a 

 state of things not consistent with this same manorial theorj'', 

 for which the law has had to invent the fiction of a lost grant. 

 But though Norman lawyers may have based their legal lore 

 on fallacious premisses, though Elizabethan judges may have 

 erred in their rulings, and though the people in primitive times 

 knew nothing of the mineral wealth beneath the soil that they 

 were thus tacitly conceding, there is nothing, surely, in all this 

 to menace, say, the Crown's title to the 130,000 forest acres of 

 Dartmoor, or the 60,000 acres of the New Forest, or to chal- 

 lenge manorial rights in Epping Forest and the Malvern Hills? 



The people knew well enough both, in England and Germany, 

 how to defend their liberties later on; and even to this day 

 their claim of pasturage on the fallows and stubbles of the 

 common lands remains unchallenged.- 



In valleys, the lord's demesnes stretched along the streams 

 at the bottom. The common pasturage ground and Lammas 

 meadows adjoined the water side ; above were the arable lands 

 separated by untilled balks into numerous strips, as far as 

 the conformation of the ground would admit of ploughing. 

 Then came the sheep pasturage, and lastly, high above all, the 

 woodlands and waste. In level districts, as in the former case, 

 the lord's waste and the common field occupied the outer 

 portion of the Tim.^ On hilly grounds an unusual mode of 

 husbandry, attributed to Mountain tribes, seems to have existed. 

 Such are the terraces or lynchets of the Wiltshire, Dorset, 

 Hampshire, and Sussex highlands, the butts of Carmarthen- 

 shire, the reins along the slopes of Wharfdale, Coverdale, 

 Wensleydale, and Niddersdale, the " hanging shaws " of Chol- 

 lerton ; and such was the cultivation pursued in other hilly 

 places throughout England, parts of Scotland, the Riviera, 

 Peru, and even China, the origin of which Mr. Gromme has 



' Compare his paper, The Origin of Rights of Common read before the 

 Incorporated Law Society at Plj-mouth, 1891. 



^ Comp. Ket's Rebellion in Tudor Times and Tlie Peasants' War in 

 Germany that followed the Reformation. 



* Gomme, Village Covimunity, c. iv. 



