24 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 



the same tenure, and his son William the other half, as a freehold. 

 Here are two clear cases of the conversion of serfs into freemen, 

 and of customary tenure into freehold. 



It would appear, therefore, to be proved that the freeholders, 

 or tenants by free socage, were, as a class, the creation of feudal- 

 ism; that the feudalization of England was accompanied, or rather 

 accomplished in detail, by the creation of a body of immediate 

 tenants to the lords of the manors, who, without these, would have 

 had no complete jurisdiction. The tenure itself would appear to be 

 simply the French censive, or agricultural fief, which is in its nature 

 and form wholly analogous with the fief proper; it may also have 

 had some analogy to the tenure by which the sochemanni of the 

 eastern counties held their land, and from this to havereceived the 

 name socagium. If this view is correct, it would follow that the 

 feudalization of the township, its conversion into the manor, con- 

 sisted in the introduction of this new class of tenants, holding by 

 a new tenure. For this purpose leading villeins would naturally 

 be selected, and the cases of Eobert son of Wlurund and Lambert 

 Gross show very clearly the process. That this class, new and 

 of foreign and feudal origin, became the most valuable and char- 

 acteristic of the English institutions, is due to the strong vitality 

 and power of assimilation of the English constitution, whose trial 

 by jury was also of foreign origin, and which even turned an ex- 

 ceptionally despotic royalty into an instrument of freedom. 



