The beneficium is partly of Roman and partly of German origin.^ In the Roman system the usufruct, the occupation of land belonging to another person, involved no diminution of the status (the condition) of the occupier ; in the Germanic system he who tilled land that was not his own was imperfectly free. Commendation on the other hand may have had a Gallic or Celtic origin, and an analogy only with the Roman clientship." *

"The beneficiary system originated partly in gifts of land made by the kings out of their own estates to their kinsmen and servants with a special undertaking to be faithful, partly in the surrender 1)y the landowners of their estates to churches or powerful men to be received back again and held by them as tenants for rent or service. By the latter arrangement

• Freeman in liis fifth volume denies this in his usnal self-sufflcient manner, and attiicks ''lawyers " for sajing so, very fiercely. But before lie ends that cliapterlie confines his words to govennnehlal matieri, and really admits that " the lawyei-s " were right after all as to the tenures.

>I. Stubbs' Cons. Hist,, 252.

'The beneficia, or benefices, were " grants of Koman provincial land by the chieftains of the tribes which overran the Roman Empire ; such grants being conferred on their associates upon certain conditions, of which the commonest was military service." Maine's Village Communities, 132. The same writer al.io says, "that in the ineradicable tendencies of the Teutonic nice, to the hereditary principle, the benefices became descendible from father to son."