Page:Landholding in England.djvu/17

 says of Saxon times: "It might almost shame a reader of our Bluebooks on 'Sale and Transfer of Land,' to find a 'Registry of Title,' and what was then almost its equivalent, a 'Register of Assurances,' existing in the ancient English County Courts, while the age of Christendom was yet written in three figures." This is an illustration of the terrible truth that the world can move backwards, that progress is very far from being constant, that ebb and flow by no means necessarily counterbalance each other, with a constant if slight gain of territory; but that a truer image is afforded by the wearing away of a coast in the storms of each succeeding winter, with occasional catastrophes by which a whole village may be carried away or a harbour ruined for ever.

In these old times before the Conquest, the power of disposition by Will was unrestricted—even an oral declaration was valid if made in the presence of eight or ten witnesses. All Wills had to be established in the County Court.

It is from Domesday Book that we get the deepest insight into life in rural England in the tenth and eleventh centuries—and most of the life was rural; there were very few towns of any size. Domesday sheds a light backwards over the seventy years since Ethelred the Unready, and tells us almost as much of England before the Conquest as of England afterwards. It shows us what the English meant when they took the Conqueror at his word, and demanded their old laws. Long before Domesday, the land had been divided into hides, or as it was called "hidated." Domesday constantly refers to these former "hidations," and tells us that such and such land was taxed at so much "in the time of King Ethelred," or "in the time of King Edward," or "in the time of Harald"—whom it never calls King. The first hidation for assessment was made in the time of Ethelred the Unready (979-1016). That unlucky monarch raised a tax called the "Danegeld," variously described as a war tax for resisting the Danes when they came, and as a bribe to induce them not to come. For long, the "hide" was a very elastic term. The Latin equivalents show that it meant whatever land was attached to a homestead. After the Conquest, a "carucate," or " plough-land " (called also an "oxgang") meant as much