ON LAND TENURE IN ANCIENT TIMES. £73 
Mr. Frederic Seebohm, in his recent work, The English 
Village Community, a volume of great research and close 
reasoning, has afforded us abundant materials for a vivid 
picture of English Village-Communities as they existed 
during the ages of serfdom, and also for a view, so far as it 
can now be obtained, of the Welsh, Irish, and Scottish tribal 
land systems.* This work is one of much interest and value 
aS an essay in economic history, but it is mainly occupied 
with examining Village-Communities and the Celtic tribal 
systems as they appear after the vast pressure of the Ronian 
Empire had modified their once free forms, and, at all events 
in the case of the former, converted their open fields into the 
shell of a serfdom, first Roman, then Saxon, and finally 
Norman. Here Mr. Seebohin has carried his investigations 
further than those of Sir Henry Sumner Maine, and kas 
shown us exactly the nature of the holding in England of 
arable land under the open field system of the Roman villa, 
the Saxon ham, and the Norman manor, all three having 
much in common with one another, and with the still freer 
and more primitive tenure of land in pre-Roman times. 
After the Norman Conquest, the Village-Communities appear 
to have lost for a time the last vestiges of liberty, the lord 
of the manor obtaining, for the most part, the absolute 
ownership of the soil, which in earlier days had been held in 
common by the people. But even then “the unity of the 
villata [or body of villein tenants] as a self-acting community 
is illustrated by the fact that in many instances the services 
of the villani [that is, the whole Village-Community in 
villenage] are farmed by them from the monastery [of Boldon] 
as a body, at a single rent for the whole village,” as appears 
from the Boldon Book, a survey of the manors belonging to 
the Bishop of Durham in 1183. 
During these feudal times the manor consisted of two 
parts, the land in demesne and the land in villenage. The 
land in demesne was that part retained by the lord for his 
own use, namely, the mansion house and its grounds, the home 
farm, woods, and other portions of land “irregular in area, 
let out from it to what are called free tenants (/ibere 
tenentes), Some of them being, nevertheless, villeins holding 
their portions of the demesne lands in free tenure at certain 
* The English Village Community examined in its relation to the Manorial 
and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry. 
An Essay in Economic History. Longmans, 1883. 
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