2 1 4 History of the English Landed Interest, 



claims to tlie mineral rights of the foreign lands.^ Nor did 

 any direct question of surface rights arise ; but an altercation 

 between tenants in capite and their subfeudarii indirectly 

 brought this subject into prominence. 



The landlords had no intention whatever of emancipating 

 the people, and the latter had no intention of emancipating 

 the soil. " If the Czar frees the Russian moujik," wrote the Duo 

 de Morny as late as the present century to his imperial master 

 in Paris, " he will be freeing the land." This was probably 

 exactly the view our Norman aristocracy took of the situation, 

 and therefore they clung fast to their powers over the villein 

 while they allowed him his full rights over the land. When 

 in Tudor times they began to convert his common field into 

 the enclosures of individual ownership, the way had been 

 paved for them long before, not, as in the Russian case, by 

 a sudden constitutional grant of liberty, but by a gradual 

 cession of seignorial rights, which, though terminating in 

 emancipation, gained at the same time the co-operation of all 

 the enfranchised grades of the villeinage, and in proportion 

 weakened the ranks of those whose interests were threatened. 

 But even at this early period the pages of the statute book 

 betray an ambiguity regarding the ownership of waste lands, 

 which led to much contention. As we have said, the agitation 

 arose not from the ranks of the villeins, but higher up amongst the 

 subfeudarii, and the struggle centred around those remnants of 

 the Folcland now known as lord's waste. The infeoffed knights 

 and freeholders had their own pasturage and forest rights 

 attached to their tenements, but they advanced a further claim 

 to rights of houseboote, heyboote, etc., over the whole baronial 

 waste. They adopted a policy which has been called " running 

 with the hare and hunting with the hounds," and appeared 

 under a twofold guise. As possessors of seignorial powers they 

 claimed their rights of common to the pastures and woods of 

 their own estates, and as possessors of popular rights they 

 saved their own private preserves at the expense of those 

 assumed to belong to the tenant in capite, and cut their fuel 

 and turf or pastured their live stock on the whole baronial 



' I use the term employed in the Extenta Man., 4 Ed. I. s. 11. 



