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Proceedings of the Poyal Society 
originally no doubt a certain rude equality, but it was only “ pares 
cum paribus,” and tlie “ peers ” were few, tlie commons were tlie 
many. Tlie Celtic tribe was an exclusive corporation to which 
birth within its own purple was as essential as it was at the 
Court of the Empire : the Saxon freeholder was an aristocrat of 
the bluest blood — no base intruder was permitted to share the 
privileges or the powers to which the freeholder alone was born — ■ 
it was oligarchy saturated with caste. The essay in which Mr. 
Freeman identifies the wittengemote, which has been to many the 
type of popular self-government by landowners of a common estate 
with the House of Lords, not the House of Commons, forcibly 
illustrates what I say ; but the case of Lauder illustrates it in a 
startling though a more homely fashion. There there are 105 free- 
men, and they have successfully resisted the claims of the profane 
vulgar of that august city to participate in their privileges : one 
would regret that anything should happen to shatter so interesting 
a petrefaction and crystallisation of ancient tenure, but a tenure 
which maintains an exclusive right of 105 persons to appropriate 
the ancient common property of the “ gemote ” is not what I should 
designate as a peculiarly popular system ; it is most interesting that 
these village aristocrats should share the arable mark and feed 
their fifteen sheep apiece on the common waste of Saxon tenure, as 
their fathers did in the , time of the Maid of Norway ; but though 
history would have lost a graphic illustration it would not seem to 
me that humanity would have suffered an irremediable loss had the 
common estate of Lauder assimilated itself to modern tenure and 
been devoted to the homely function of bringing in water and 
clearing out the sewage of that ancient, not to say archaic burgh, 
even if in the process individual had taken the place of communal 
right. 
It is seven centuries since these ancient systems we have been 
considering have exercised any direct or practical control over the 
tenure of the land in which we live, seven centuries full of change 
and of incident, powerful enough even if compressed into a briefer 
period to have severed any connection which the active life of the 
present day could have had with the defunct systems of an almost 
prehistoric age. But while no doubt much pedantry and affecta- 
tion have been of late exhibited in the attempt to ascribe to these 
archaic systems an influence on our modern institutions which it 
