Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/120

 106 /. BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST revenues of lands, often of extensive districts, to the Church, or more accurately speaking to churches, by written charters framed in imitation of continental models. Land held under these grants by charter or " book," which in course of time acquired set forms and characters peculiar to England, was called bookland, and the king's bounty in this kind was in course of time extended to his lay magnates. The same extraordinary power of the king, exercised with the witness and advice ^ of his witan, which could confer a title to princely revenues, could also confer large disposing capacities unknown to the customary law; thus the fortunate holder of bookland might be and often was entitled not only to make a grant in his lifetime or to let it on such terms as he chose, but also to leave it by will. My own belief is that the land given by the Anglo-Saxon wills which are preserved was almost always bookland even when it is not so described. Indeed these wills are rather in the nature of postponed grants, as in Scotland a " trust disposition " had to be till quite lately, than a true last will and testament as we now understand it. They certainly had nothing to do with the Roman testament,^ Long before the Conquest it had become the ambition of every man of substance to hold bookland, and we may well think that this was on the way to become the normal form of land-ownership. But this process, whatever its results might have been, was broken off by the advent of Norman lords and Norman clerks with their own different set of ideas and forms. The various customs of inheritance that are to be found even to this day in English copyholds, and to a limited extent in freehold land, and which are certainly of great antiquity, bear sufficient witness that at least as much variety was to be found before the Conquest. Probably the least usual of the typical customs was primogeniture; preference of the youngest son, ultimogeniture or junior-right as recent au- thors have called it, the " borough-English " of our post- the section " Book-land and Folk-land " in Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 244 sqq. » See P. & M., Hist. Eng. L., bk. II. c. vi. § 3,
 * A strictly accurate statement in few words is hardly possible. See