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Rh in the country was held by a certain number of tenants-in-chief, including ecclesiastical incorporations and boroughs, from the king, while all the rest of the population consisted either of under-tenants or of persons settled on the land of some tenant and amenable to jurisdiction through the latter. In other West-European countries the distribution of the people was more intricate and confused because there had been no wholesale conquest capable of reducing conditions to uniformity, but the fundamental facts were the same. Every West-European country was arranged on the basis of feudal land-tenure.

The acts constituting the feudal contract were called homagium and investitura. The tenant had to appear in person before the lord surrounded by his court, to kneel before him and to put his folded hands into the hand of the lord, saying: "I swear to be faithful and attached to you as a man should be to his lord." He added sometimes: "I will do so as long as I am your man and as I hold your land" (Saxon Lehnrecht, ch. 3). To this act of homage corresponded the "investiture" by the lord, who delivered to his vassal a flag, a staff, a charter or some other symbol of the property conceded. There were many variations according to localities and, of course, the ceremony differed in the case of a person of base status. Yet even a villein received his yard-land or oxgang from the steward of a lord after swearing an oath of fealty and in the form of an "admittance" by the staff, of which a record was kept in the rolls of the manorial court: hence the copyhold tenure of English law.

Tenure conditioned by service was called the feudum, fief, Lehn, but sometimes these terms were restricted to the better class of such estates, those held by military service, while the lands for which rents and labour-services were rendered were described as censivae, in England socagia. The holdings of villeins or rustics (Bauern, roturiers) were deemed in law to be at the will of the lord, but in practice were protected by the local custom and generally subjected to quasi-legal rules of possession and inheritance. Although feudal tenure was certainly the most common mode of holding land, it was not the only one. In France and Germany there were still many survivals of allodial right, that is of complete ownership, not subject to any conditions of service or payment. In fact, while in northern France there obtained the rule nulle terre sans seigneur, that is, the doctrine that all estates were held by feudal law under lords, in southern France, the territory of written law based on Roman books, the contrary was expressed in the words nul seigneur sans titre: no lordship was recognised unless proof of title were forthcoming. Many documents shew the constant spread of feudal tenure at the expense of the allodial: the process of feudalisation is, e.g., forcibly illustrated by the inquest as to land-tenures made in 1272 and 1273 by order of King Edward I in Aquitaine: it testified to all sorts of variations in the mode of holding land in these parts; claims to