196 REPORT—1874. 
primeval fertility of the land was exhausted, the people moved to another portion 
and repeated the process there. 
The land which was originally held by tribes became subject to periodical re- 
distribution ; but as its cultivation became more settled, and improvement more 
common, the practice of redistribution gradually fell into desuetude, and the 
shareholders retained their shares. That process the author had seen step by 
step going on. Not only were the grazing lands and also wood, water, and 
other things held in common, but the inchoate individual rights were in ve 
many cases subject to the rights and convenience of the community in general. 
‘A holder could not alienate his individual holding to a stranger, arable lands 
were unenclosed, and there was a universal right of way so long as the growing 
crops were not unfairly damaged ; also there was a right of common pasture when 
the crops were off the ground. It was, indeed, one of the most painful features of 
our modern civilization that the land was so far enclosed that the people who did 
not own it were almost altogether confined to the highways. 
The village community was the earliest tenure in Europe and Asia in which a 
right in land could be traced. Sir Henry Mayne had well shown that traces of 
that kind of tenure exist in our own and in neighbouring countries. There were 
large traces in England and Scotland ; and Sir Henry Mayne had found one place 
in Scotland in which the ancient tenure still existed in full perfection, where the 
“infield” was permanently divided among the different members of the community, 
the “ outfield” divided temporarily according to the circumstances and necessities 
of the season, and grazing land quite undivided. In Ireland the tribal rights, which 
undoubtedly had existed, were only superseded by conquest. In the Highlands of 
Scotland, where the people and their institutions were cognate with those of Ive- 
sand, the same rights prevailed, which were abolished partly by conquest after the 
rebellion, partly by the lawyers, who applied the principles of feudal tenure to the 
estates of the Highland chiefs; and thus, while the chiefs were constituted feudal 
holders, their co-proprietors, the clansmen, were dispossessed and in a certain 
degree expatriated. Under the feudal system the rights of the Celtic people were in 
theory wholly ignored, and the villagers were treated as serfs bound to the soil. He 
thought it very clear that the system under which the serfs became adscripti glebze 
was adopted to prevent moving from one part of the country to another, which 
might have given certain rights to the subject people. There were two rights which 
mitigated despotism over a subject people: first, the right of rebellion; and 
secondly, the right of running away. That of rebellion was very important. He 
need not say more of that at present. The right of running away was not sufficiently 
understood. He had seen a great deal of benefit obtained from that right. When 
a man was much oppressed it was a very great right that he should be enabled 
to run away, to desert his master, and enlist himself under the banner of a new 
one. In days of anarchy, when lords were ready to turn their hands against each 
other, it was necessary to establish a kind of trades’ union to prevent that emigra- 
tion. One way of doing that was by passing a law to prevent serfs from running 
away. But even the binding of the serfs to the soil gave them certain rights in 
connexion with the soil, so that what was injurious in one way was beneficial in 
another. The other day, in Russia, on the occasion of the emancipation of the serfs, 
the view put forward by the latter was—“ True, we are yours; but the land is ours.” 
Philologers believe that some of the modern languages are not corruptions of the 
ancient ones, but revivals of popular languages of ancient days. So also with 
regard to the inferior rights to land, the author was inclined to believe 
that the lower classes of tenure which cropped up in altered forms under the 
feudal system were not merely what the lawyers held them to be, the produce of 
indulgence and prescription, but a revival, in another form, of the old right of the 
subject people, long suppressed, but never wholly extinguished. Such he believed 
to be the English copyhold tenure. In Ireland the ancient rights of the people had 
been recently recognized in the Land Act. The numerous commons in England 
were, no doubt, very substantial remains of the old rights of the communal holding. 
The right of primogeniture he believed to have arisen simply because the title to 
land was not an absolute right. It was evident that some one person must be respon- 
sible for the duties of an office, which duties could not be divided amongst the 
