These "privileges and franchises" are set forth at length in every Manor Grant, being such incidents of the Grant as the Crown chose to express in the instrument itself, and saw fit to bestow upon the grantee therein named.

These privileges and franchises of " the Freehold Manors of New York " as Chief Justice Denio styles them, were, in his words," " free from the vexatious incidents of the feudal tenures. And he further says " the feudal system, which if it ever prevailed in the American colonies, had been shorn of its most severe

• 'Chief Justice Ambrose Spencer, said from the bench that the statute in question never applied to the Americau Colonies. 18 Johnson p. 180.

feature before either of the grants in question, [or any other of the Manor grants in New York] was made, by the statute of Charles II. ch. 24, which [in 1660] abolished the Military tenures and changed them into free aud common socage." This tenure as we have seen is purely allodial, save only in the fealty due the King as the ultimate lord of all the land of the realm. It was formally, as has previously been stated, declared by the Provincial Act of 1691 to be the tenure of lands in the Province of New York. No change was made or efi'ectedby the American Revolution, except that the Independent Sovereign State of New York succeeded to the position of the King as ultimately entitled to all the land within its borders. On the 20th of February 1787, before the United States had an existence, before the Convention of Independent States out of which this Union proceeded, had been chosen, and two years and twelve days before the Constitution of the United States formed by that convention went into efiect, the Legislature of the State of New York, passed an " Act concerning Tenures " of a remarkable character.