Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/446

 432 ///. THE COLONIAL PERIOD The starting point of the controversy and its underlying cause was the agrarian system of New England. It is well known to students of the subject that the methods employed in the division of lands by the proprietors of the parlous towns involved certain principles based on the necessities of a new country. We may believe, if we wish, that these methods were the expression of deep-seated racial traits, but it is more rational to take into account two influences only; first, the agrarian environment in which the settlers had been reared; and, secondly, the conditions and necessities that govern the settlement of a new and uninhabited country. These two considerations will concern us here. Those who settled the New England colonies were — save in a very few cases — men of the burgher and freeholder class, to whom the detail of the English agricultural life was familiar. They had been inhabitants of towns and villages located on feudal estates and subject to a superior, the King or the lesser lay or ecclesiastical lord; they had in a large number of cases been reared in the midst of the English agricultural system, of which the village community with its long streets, its homesteads, its open fields divided into shots or furlongs and subdivided into what were originally acre and half acre strips, its meadows, pastures, common and waste, was the local unit and that part of the system with which they weYe in daily contact. To this system that of New England bears a striking resemblance. One cannot compare the old manor maps of the seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries with any plan based upon the land records of a New England town without feeling that the similarities are more than coincidences. There is the same village street, the same homestead plots, the same great fields, the same shots and furlongs, and the same subdivision into smaller strips ; there are the enclosed meadows held by a few, the pasture and the waste common to all, and there are numbers of trifling manners and customs which show the English origin. It was the local, non-feudal land system which was transplanted with important changes to New Enorland, and formed the basis of the law of real property. Eut were we to be satisfied with this statement of the case.