THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
GO 
the existence of an extended area of national or folk-land, distinct 
from the ownership of communities or individuals, 1 so we have in 
our not infrequent Bucklands — or loclands — proofs of private 
estates "created by legal process out of the public land." 2 The 
primitive borough constitution to which reference has been made 
may date almost from the earliest times of Saxon settlement, since, 
both for mutual aid and for protection, some organization must 
have been needful. I am somewhat inclined to regard the "stocks" 
as the primitive form of the " burns," so far as Devon is concerned; 
but it must always be doubtful how far the defensive element in 
our local Saxon nomenclature is due to British antagonism, or to 
the need of protection against the ravages of the Northmen. 
Such, viewed by modern lights, and gauged by modern methods, 
seem to me the leading features of the early history of our county. 
If some of the conclusions appear novel, perchance even startling, 
they are not the less likely to be correct because the result of an 
attempt to harmonize various independent, but converging, branches 
of enquiry; while it is certain that only in such general accord can 
truth be found. Something at least is gained if continuity is seen 
as well as succession ; if development is recognised in antiquity; if 
the past is read in the present ; and if we learn that separation in 
time does not of necessity imply equal divergence in character. 
The cave-dwellers of Torbay; the races for whom Palaeolithic and 
Neolithic are our only distinctive names ; the unknown workers of 
the first bronze dug from our moors and hills; — these distant 
ancestors, with Kelt and Eoman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman — pre- 
historic or historic matters not — were all men of like feelings and 
failings, powers and passions, with ourselves. We cannot sever 
the links that bind us to them, nor cut off the entail of their per- 
sistent influence. 
1 Dartmoor is not appropriated in Domesday ; but the Norman king sue- 
ceeded as a matter of course to the public rights of the Saxon monarch, or of 
the Saxon state, thereafter denned under the forest laws. 
2 Stubbs, Op. cit. p. 76. 
VOL. VIII. 
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