1 74 History of the English Landed Interest. 



ship," His efforts give him at first a right of excluding others, 

 and then, as they come to produce a more lasting effect, a right 

 of transferring his lands to others when death shall have de- 

 prived him of their enjoyment. These first few steps are very 

 similar in all nations. The Teutonic soldier, for instance, was 

 once content with his " munera," or grant of seignorial powers 

 over a certain area of land ; then, as his ideas grew, the " bene- 

 ficia " or life interest in the grant alone would satisfy him. 

 But to hold such a grant for life on condition that the holder 

 jeopardises that life annually in military service, was a land 

 system which could not but breed a nation of cowards. Both 

 parties therefore saw the necessity of the " feud " or extension of 

 the grant to the sons of the tenant. And when man arrives at 

 the difficult subject of land succession, he has reached a stage 

 at which he requires some certain and powerful agency like the 

 law to act for him at a time when he can no longer express or 

 enforce his wishes. The greater and more permanent his im- 

 provements to the property he demises, the greater necessity 

 for the law's powerful assistance. That special branch of his 

 industry covered by the term " husbandry " necessitates a 

 special branch of legislation, which is the more comprehensive 

 and intricate the more comprehensive and intricate his 

 husbandry becomes, until in this 19th century there is hardly 

 any improvement known to an English husbandman which 

 does not find its scale of compensatory charges in the agricul- 

 tural Acts of recent years. It might almost be supposed that a 

 shrewd farmer would be able to gauge a nation's system of 

 husbandry by an examination of its code, and that a shrewd 

 lawyer, reversing this process, could diagnose a nation's laws (at 

 any rate those referring to real property) by the condition of 

 its cultivation. Up to this period all English legislation, so far 

 as it referred to fraud, had been confined to the prevention 

 and punishment of any offences against movable property. 

 The land could not be destroyed or stolen, and trade had been 

 so little practised that delinquencies occurred too rarely in 

 these interests to attract much legal attention. But the time 

 had now arrived when their increased national importance 

 necessitated a fresh class of laws. 



