Toivn^ Township and Tithing. 149 



as the Court Leet. The Court Leet, found also in the Hundred and the Bor- 

 ough, was, as is shown by the example given above, an assembly for the 

 passing of bye-laws and administering the affairs of the town, the precise 

 prototype of the New England town meeting. It also had a limited police 

 jurisdiction, held to be derived from that of the Sheriff's Tourn or Leet of the 

 Hundred. It was not a necessary part of the feudal or manorial organization, 

 but, "was created by special grants from the crown to certain lords of manor 

 in order thg,t they might administer justice to their tenants at home." Quoted 

 by Elton, " Custom and Tenant Right (1882)," p. 89. It was a thoroughly 

 democratic institution, " being regarded as the court of the residents 

 within the district; not of the tenants of the manor; " and " so far is this 

 carried that a stranger passing by may be compelled to serve on the leet 

 jury. The fact of his being found within the district is deemed sufficient 

 evidence." Digby, Int. to the Law of Real Property, p. 45. The Leet, as a 

 popular court, is also found in Iceland during the middle ages. The antiquity 

 and primitive character of this court is attested by Elton, who says (on 

 ■Copyholds, p. 240) it "is in all probability older than the manorial sys- 

 tem itself: " and by Ritson, " The Jurisdiction of the Court Leet," who says 

 (p. 6): " The Leet is the most ancient court in the land." This court elected 

 the constable, and, in some boroughs, the mayor (id. p. x.). 



It is not surprising, considering their early and almost universal con- 

 version into manorial estates, that we find so few traces of free townships 

 in England. From their absence, Mr. Seebolmi has attempted to estabhsh 

 the thesis that the townships of England were regularly manorial estates, 

 and the peasants serfs, from the earliest settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in 

 the country. " The evidence of the earliest Saxon and Jutish laws " he 

 says, "thus leaves us with a strong presum^jtion, if not actual certainty, 

 that the Saxon ham or tun was the estate of a lord, and not of a free village 

 community." (English Village Communities, -p. 175.) I attempted in my 

 paper, read a year ago to show that, with regard to the peasantry, his evi- 

 dence was inadequate, and that we have good ground for affirming the ex- 

 istence of a large class of free peasants in the earliest time. My object in 

 the present paper has been to continue the argument, and show that there 

 is good reason to believe that there were* fi-ee townships as weU as a free 

 peasantry in the earliest English period. In arguing, however, that the 

 township was a body politic, and "the unit of the constitutional machin- 

 ery." I would not be understood to claim for it original and self-existent 

 autonomy, even in the period of the eaiiiest evolution of institutions. As- 

 suming that the Germanic peoples passed from a community of occupa- 

 tion based upon kinship to one based upon territorial relations; it was the 

 Hundred, not the township, that formed the earliest territorial community 

 or markgenossenschaft. The township, or Dovfscliaft, is shown by Thudi- 

 chum to have been formed out of the hundred by a process of sub-division; 

 and in this process the German district tluis formed succeeded to no 

 integral share of the powers of the original organization, but stood to it as 



