The Inaugural Address. 



11 



their prosperity they signed their own death-warrant, and the family 

 of the Somersets, the universal land-hungerers of this part of the 

 country, ate us up, as the Zulus say. We were, before the Somersets 

 devoured us, a community of customary tenants holding* under one 

 landlord, the Priory. We afterwards passed to the See of Salisbury, 

 and were lorded over by a succession of tenants of that see, until 

 about ten years ago, when our lands were converted into the freehold 

 tenure on which they are now held. The customary tenants lingered 

 on until quite recent times, and there is still just a trace of them ; 

 but, speaking generally, the lands are all freehold and the cottagers 

 tenants at will. This is shortly the history of eight hundred years 

 of the existence of one particular parish, and surely there may be 

 traced in it the history of all England. The comparative indepen- 

 dence of the Saxon Thane, paying only his geld and his personal 

 service — the rapacity, mixed with a certain religious superstition, of 

 the followers of the Conqueror, taking without scruple on the one 

 hand from the Saxon proprietor and giving without stint on the 

 other hand to the Church for the benefit of their souls. The mild 

 and industrious rule of the monks, turning the waste lands to profit, 

 rearing flocks and herds, creating new industries, and gradually 

 emancipating the agricultural tenant from a state of servitude to one 

 of freedom and of even more substantiality than he enjoys at present. 

 The spoliation of the industrious community of the monks, which 

 in our case at least, had not even the allegation of corruption to 

 justify it, and the absorption of their lands and goods for purposes 

 of family and personal greed and aggrandisement. And finally the 

 creation of the class of great landholders, absolutely free of their 

 properties so long only as they are faithful subjects of the State. 

 Surely here by the study of the archaeology of one parish you find 

 a type of the history of the country. Ladies and gentlemen, I 

 have finished, and I trust that you will not have found the remarks 

 I have made either inappropriate or too long. I have felt, I can 

 assure you, throughout, very much in the position in which the 

 celebrated Dr. Dodd once found himself. One day, at one of the 

 universities, when he was innocently taking* his walks abroad, he 

 found himself pursued by a troop of undergraduates, who, to phrase 



