3S8 History of the English Landed Interest. 



manorial community may let a cottage to any person not 

 having legal settlement in the district. Occasionally the roll 

 records a penalty for some one's offence in " projecting " on a 

 highway, and fixes the fines for owing suits and not appearing. 

 The inhabitants of some village are ordered to lay ashes or 

 muck on the highway, and each to keep his house in proper 

 repair. Christian Helme is made to turn his water from Gib 

 Hey Lane before the feast of St. John the Baptist ; John Berne 

 is stopped putting cattle on Piseloche Common ; the villagers 

 of Chipping must construct a pound ; an escheat is made out 

 against Edward Hawkinson, who defies the order by pre- 

 deceasing its execution ; Robert Eales for having some one 

 else's wife as a lodger is heavily mulcted and compelled to 

 remove the woman from the manor. 



Such business as this, partly that of a modern Local Board, 

 and partly that of a modern land agent, occupies the principal 

 attentio^n of the court. Schedules and valuations are periodi- 

 cally ordered to be made of the manorial leasehold, freehold 

 and common lands ; or a fresh enquiry is determined upon by 

 the jury concerning the lord's boundary ; or an affidavit is 

 wanted about a right of road ; or some poaching affair crops 

 up to vary the monotony of these everyday occurrences, and 

 this represents the sum of all that survives of that jurisdiction 

 which under the old Saxon terms of sac, soc, toll and team 

 made the landlord of the mediaeval era both powerful and 



opulent. 



******* 



The half of a great subject has been now brought to a 

 conclusion. Before the pen is laid aside, let us glance briefly 

 over the events hitherto chronicled. "We have beheld the 

 surface of England's soil trodden by the hoof of a pastoral 

 community's cattle, and we have watched it turned over by 

 the successive ploughs of Roman, Saxon, Norman, and English- 

 man. We liave described its very depths as stirred by the 

 tin miner, chasmed by the iron founder, and tunneled by the 

 collier. We have studied the fortunes of its cultivators, and 

 have followed the exaltation of the husbandman from slave 

 to gebur, from villein to copyholder, and from free-farmer to 



