CHAPTER XII 



THE ENCROACHMENTS 



" Quantum est additiim vel ablatum ? " 



WHEN a foreign invader settles in a conquered country 

 and takes possession of the lands occupied by the 

 conquered race, there are not unnaturally com- 

 plaints of hardship. We have already studied some of the 

 cases of hardship which are recorded in Domesday Book, in 

 the degradation of the freeholders, and under the question, 

 "What has been added to the manor, or what has been 

 taken away from it ? " the Cambridgeshire jurors were asked 

 to furnish particulars of another cause of complaint. Let us 

 remember the state of the country. For centuries Englishmen 

 had held lands in Cambridgeshire ; but England had been 

 conquered by the Normans, and the ancestral lands of its 

 inhabitants had been taken away from them and given to 

 the victors. But when King William made gifts to his 

 followers, in most cases he did not give individual estates 

 or districts, the village of A or the hundred of B, but he 

 gave to X, his Norman follower, all the estates in a certain 

 county or in certain counties belonging to Y, the dispossessed 

 Englishman. But Y's interests in these estates were com- 

 plicated : some he held in demesne, and of these estates in 

 demesne portions were let to tenants ; others were thegnland ; 

 over others he had a right of sake and soke, a right to the 

 fines arising therefrom ; and again it might be that certain 



214 



