From the members of these families the leader for a military expedition would, as a rule, be chosen, and the power he would thus acquire " would be a combination of political, military, and judicial, power." This leader, " thus taken from the privileged fauiily would have the largest share of the lands appropriated from the conquered village societies; and there is ground for supposing that he was sometimes rewarded by an exceptionally large share of the common land belonging to the society which he headed." Another privilege which the leading family and its chief obtained, was the power " to sever his own plot of land from the rest, and, if he thought fit, to enclose it ; and thus break up or enfeeble that system of common cultivation under rules of obligatory custom which depended mainly on the concurrence of all the villagers." ' Add to this the inherent tendency of the Teutonic mind to the principle of primogeniture, and we have the basis of what is known as the manorial system. Transplanted into England by its early German invaders this inchoate manorial system tojk root and existed under the Saxon domination till the days of Harold. At the Norman conquest, which, as we have seen, brought full-grown to England the Feudal System, William of Normandy had little difficulty in engrafting it upon the existing Saxon system, or rather in transforming that system into Norman Feudalism, which was that of France and Continental Europe.

Such is the view, of the latest historians, and most learned writers, on this subject. A view most tersely summed up by Sir Henry Maine, " our modern English conception of absolute property in land is really descended from the special proprietorship enjoyed by the Lord, and more anciently by the tribal chief, in his own Domain." "Manors," Sir William Blackstone, tells us "are in substance as ancient as the Saxon Constitution, though perhaps differing a little in some immaterial circumstances from those which exist at this day ; just as we observed of feuds, that they were partly known to our ancestors, even before the Norman Conquest."'