356 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



should always be held by some person capable of serving in 

 war, as well as of discharging the less definite obligations, in 

 lieu of rent, which afterwards became regular legal incidents of 

 tenure in chivalry. In most instances the eldest son would be 

 the one most capable, on the father's death, of undertaking his 

 feudal liabilities ; but this was not the only reason why primo- 

 geniture gradually superseded joint ownership and equal division. 

 In those wild and unsettled times, it was as necessary for the 

 family as for the lord that it should have one acknowledged head 

 to govern it, one standard round which all its members and 

 dependants could rally, one judgment-seat to which all disputes 

 could be referred. The disorganised state of society compelled a 

 recurrence to something like the patriarchal system of family 

 government ; but whereas that system had developed into the 

 rule of equal inheritance, feudalism, under a different order of 

 conditions, became the parent of primogeniture. 



The eldest son, therefore, was invested with his exceptional 

 privileges under the feudal system not because he was supposed 

 to have any exceptional rights but rather because he was sup- 

 posed to be the most eligible for the performance of exceptional 

 duties. He was not, however, invariably preferred ; and we 

 know that merit had far more to do with inheritance in the first 

 age of feudalism than it has with succession to estates or titles 

 in our own days. The Crown itself was then, in some degree, 

 elective in every feudal monarchy ; and it is more than probable 

 that fiefs, like the chieftainship of Scotch and Irish clans, some- 

 times descended to younger brothers and sometimes to uncles. 

 When they descended, as they usually did, to eldest sons, they 

 assuredly brought with them far heavier burdens and far more 

 limited rights of proprietorship than we are wont to associate with 

 the position of a landowner. The life of a German baron under 

 the Othos, or of a Norman baron under the Conqueror and his im- 

 mediate successors, was a life of incessant toil and anxiety, seldom 

 relieved by leisure or enjoyment ; and the younger brother who 

 had entered a monastery or turned soldier of fortune had perhaps 

 little cause to envy the lord of several castles, whose revenues, 

 paid in kind, were devoured by hungry and turbulent retainers. 



