Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/864

 LAND-TENURE

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LAND-TENURE

and of water-power, etc. The village mill was com- monly a monopoly of the lords, and one or two other things common to the village life. That is, he took regular and fixed dues of them, but he could not, of course, as could a modern proprietor, use them with a single eye to his benefit, or charge what rates he chose.

The analogy of feudal ideas which had extended upwards from their origins, the unit landowners of the Roman system, extended also downward from them to the estate which they had formerly owned and of which they were now but the seigniorial holders. The villein was not said to own, but to hold ; he held of his lord in return for service, and by a bond which, though it was not military and honourable, as was fides, was yet based upon the same ethical conception of a moral due, rather than an economic contract.

The system was complicated by other less common forms of tenure. Thus freeholders were discovered side by side with the villeins — that is, men whose lit- tle properties involved some form of service not thought service or degraded; for instance, it was a common, though not a universal, rule that if a man could prove never to have paid anything but a fixed money due for his land, he was to be deemed a free- holder. And all non-servile work for the lord came in the same category. The tenure of the priest was of another kind, and so forth. There were also numer- ous lesser people who had very small portions of land (the villein might have anything from 15 or 30 acres to as much as 120 or more), but the general frame of society when feudalism was in its vigour was as we have described it.

Caught in the general agricultural system around them were the old Roman municipalities with which this article has not to deal — Orleans, Chartres, Rouen, Limoges, to take a few Gallic names quite at random; Newcastle, London, Winchester, to take three British names equally at random. And these municipalities were, in practice, of course com- posed of a number of small absolute owners of the land on which their houses' and their gardens stood. But so strong was the feudal idea that it was extended by analogy even to the cities. A city would have a lord, very often the Crown, or some bishop, or other great officer of state. Thepublic taxes paid were paid to this lord under the analogy of feudal tenure in the village. AVhen the development of commerce during and after the Crusades made the fiction inconvenient, the lords granted charters, that is, written acknowledgments of the town's immemorial customs, and often added to these special immunities from interference, in re- turn for money.

Other exceptions to the feudal system are to be found in the allodial lands, which simply means the estates, large or small, which had never got caught in the feudal development at all, but remained held in absolute ownership from an unbroken tradition of Roman institutions. These were especially common in the south of France, and it is characteristic of the organizing power of the Normans that they, in their passion for system, refused to admit so unfeudal a con- ception within their dominions, so that to this day in England there is technically no such absolute owner- ship of land possible.

Other exceptions again are to be found in the communal arrangements of the mountain valleys — notalily in the Alps and Pyrenees, where the feudal system had never really taken root, and where remote and isolated villages have from time immemorial ar- ranged, and do to this day arrange, their affairs upon an economic .system which corres[>oiids to tlirir polit- ical republicanism. It should always be niiicnibcred that in this most ancient and unihangi'd of Kuropean societies private ownership in land is absolute and most strictly recognized. Communal management attaches only to wood, pasture, and here and there a public field.

The next step in our inquiry must be: How this es- tablished feudal system proceeded to its decay. To understand the decline of the feudal system and the transformation of the feudal tenure into the land-ten- ure of modern Christendom, it must first be clearly understood that what I have called the indestructible idea of private property in land survived, paradoxi- cal as it may seem, throughout the whole long reign of so-called tenure. It was present when the absolute owners of the Roman estates began to group them- selves in Gaul into patrons and clients, "lords" and "men", seniors and juniors; it was present when Charlemagne, in his capitularies, gave the forms of law to the personal link of tenure — military service and loyalty as the condition of holding; it was present after the irruption of the Barbarians in the ninth cen- tury, when feudalism, in a time necessarily military, struck its most vigorous roots. It was present when the Norman lawyers, just before and during the Cru- sades (that is at the end of the eleventh and during the twelfth centuries), codified the feudal system and erec- ted it into a strict machine of law.

We know that this idea of private property was present in two ways: (1) we know it as a matter of historic fact, because we find land bought and sold and mortgaged; (2) we know it as a matter of histor- ical judgment, because we find land talked of as prop- ert.y, the personal possessive pronoun used in respect to it, the conceptions of theft in regard to it, of indig- nation at its unrighteous occupation, the increasing wealth of it as accruing to a particular owner, etc., etc., all alluded to.

Had society remained primitive for many cen- turies after the full statement of feudalism in the ninth and tenth centuries, the logical clash be- tween the feudal theory of holding for service done and the intimate personal sense of property in land, which is common to all Europeans, might never have taken place. It was quite as easy for a family to go on hold- ing an estate from father to son, and to think of it as a private property on the one hand and as a tenure on the other. There was a contract in theory, but no contract in fact. True, treason against the overlord would have involved the loss of the land just as bank- ruptcy involves it now, but that was a rare contin- gency and one which the mind regarded as the more exceptional because it was disgraceful. Great lords frequently lost their overlordship, lesser lords less fre- quently, men with single estates or manors very rarely, monasteries and ecclesiastical bodies hardly ever, villeins, one may say, never at all. And the two conceptions, though contradictory in terms — the con- ception of ownership and the conception of tenure — could have lived peaceably side by side, just as, in our society for the moment, the conception of free con- tract is living peaceably side by side with the contra- dictory social fact of a proletariat and a capitalist class.

What ruined the feudal system was the tendency — as society developed in activity, as values changed, as towns grew, as a landless class developed, and as all that accompanies the expansion of a society appeared — of those who formed the units of feudal societies to define their position with exactitude. Thus, within the village community which was the microcosm of the whole, there came moments when a villein who had long ago commuted his payment in labour for a fixed payment in money was, whether by the change in the value of money or by the rise in the price of labour, more valualjle to his lord as a labourer than as a payer of dues. The lord would claim service, the villein would dispute in the court his right to service. Again, as between lord .-iiul overlord, service in men- at-arms, once natural and normal, might become a fixe<l and mechanical thing. The overlord might find it profitable to accept a redemjition of the military service required. Again, the king, in the primitive