Folk-land. Folk-land is a term which occurs only in a few documents, and then without any decisive explanation. In the most authoritative of these, a law of Edward the Elder, it is contrasted with book-land as if it included all land that was not book-land. Spelman, so reading the passage, defined folk-land as land held by common, that is customary law, without written title. On this view an Englishman who was asked, “What do you mean by folk-land? ” would have answered, “Land held by folk-right.” In 1830 John Allen put forth another view which prevailed for two generations. He said127 that “folk-land, as the word imports, was the land of the folk or people. It was the property of the community.” The proposed analogy to the Latin ager publicus was accepted as confidently as it was proposed, [p.39] and with singularly little discussion, by Kemble and almost every one who treated of Anglo-Saxon land tenures down to 1893. Difficulties occurred, however, in working out Allen’s theory, and were found to increase as one scholar after another entered farther upon details. In particular, it was hard to account for the number of freemen, which must have been considerable in the time of Edward the Elder at all events, holding land which was not book-land. Various conjectural names for that kind of holding were proposed by Kemble and others, but for none of them was there any authority. If these lands were included in folk-land, and folc-land meant ager publicus, then every one who had not book-land was in name and in law a mere tenant from the state. If not, there was no evidence that land held by the most general and practically important form of title had any proper name at all. Neither conclusion could be deemed satisfying. In 1893 Mr. Paul Vinogradoff128 pointed out that Allen’s theory was really gratuitous. The documents do not by any means require it; the analogy of other compounds in which the word folc occurs is against it; and when it turns out to give rise to more difficulties than it removes, it is better to fall back upon the older and simpler explanation. Folk-land, then, appears to have been, as Spelman said, land held without written title under customary law. We have no right to assume that there were not varieties of tenure within this general description, or that custom was uniform even in the same kingdom. It is probable that the alienation of folk-land was difficult, and we do not know to what extent, if to any considerable extent, power to dispose of it by will had been introduced. The problem of reconstructing the old folk-right in detail belongs, however, rather to the history of Germanic social antiquities than to that of the laws of England; and our interpretation of the scanty evidence available must depend in great measure on the manner in which the fuller evidence of the two centuries after the Conquest is interpreted.129
Transition to Anglo-Norman feudalism.After the Norman Conquest book-land preserved its name for [p.40] a time in some cases, but was finally merged in the feudal tenures in the course of the twelfth century. The relations of a grantee of book-land to those who held under him were doubtless tending for some considerable time before the Conquest to be practically very like those of a feudal superior; but Anglo-Saxon law had not reached the point of expressing the fact in any formal way. The Anglo-Saxon and the continental modes of conveyance and classification of tenures must have coalesced sooner or later. But the Conquest suddenly bridged a gap which at the time was still well-marked. After its work is done we find several new lines of division introduced and some old ones obliterated, while all those that are recognized are deeper and stronger than before. The king’s lordship and the hands that gather the king’s dues are everywhere; and where they have come the king’s law will soon follow.
[p.41]Obscurity of Norman legal history. Of the law of Normandy as it was on the eve of William’s expedition, little is known for certain. To illustrate the period which had elapsed since the settlement of the Northmen in Neustria, there are no written laws, no books on law and very few charters, while the chroniclers have not much to tell about the legal structure of the duchy, and what they tell is not always trustworthy. The England of the same period supplies us with the laws of Edward the Elder, Æthelstan, Edmund, Edgar, Æthelred and Cnut; also with a large collection of land-books and writs. Even in later days, after the duke of the Normans had become king of the English, the duchy was slow to follow the kingdom in the production of abiding memorials of its law. It has nothing to set against Domesday Book or against those law-books which we know as the Leges of [p.42] the Confessor, the Conqueror and Henry the First. The oldest financial records,2 the oldest judicial records3 that it has transmitted to us, are of much later date than the parallel English documents. Its oldest law-books, two small treatises now fused together and published under the title Le très ancien Coutumier,4 are younger and slighter than our Glanvill, and the Grand Coutumier, if not younger, is slighter than our Bracton.5 Doubtless we have been more fortunate than our neighbours in the preservation of documents; still we have every reason to believe that the conquerors of England had little, if any, written law to bring with them. Hrolf, it is true, had gained the reputation of lawgiver; but our own history will show us that such a reputation might be easily gained by one who was regarded as the founder of a state or the representative of a race: Alfred was becoming, Edward the Confessor was to become, the hero of a legal myth. Hrolf may have published laws, in particular laws about theft, but what we hear of them will hardly dispose us to think that they would remain in force for long.6 But not only had the Normans no written law of their own making; there was none that they could readily borrow from their French neighbours. Their invasions occurred in the very midnight of the legal history of France; indeed they brought the midnight with them. The stream of capitularies ceases to flow; no one attempts to legislate; and when the worst days are over, the whole structure of society has been so much changed, that the old written laws, the Lex Salica, the ordinances [p.43] of Merovingian and Karlovingian kings, will no longer meet the facts. When an Englishman of the twelfth century, the compiler of the Leges Henrici, strives to eke out the old English dooms with foreign texts and goes as far back as the Lex Salica, which was centuries old before Hrolf landed in Normandy, we know that he has no foreign texts at his command that are less obsolete.
Norman law was French.The yet debated question, whether for a century or thereabouts after their settlement in Neustria, the law of the Northmen or Normans was mainly Frankish or mainly Scandinavian, we are not called upon to discuss. It is now generally admitted that for at least half a century before the battle of Hastings, the Normans were Frenchmen, French in their language, French in their law, proud indeed of their past history, very ready to fight against other Frenchmen if Norman home-rule was endangered, but still Frenchmen, who regarded Normandy as a member of the state or congeries of states that owed service, we can hardly say obedience, to the king at Paris. Their spoken language was French, their written language was Latin, but the Latin of France; the style of their legal documents was the style of the French chancery; very few of the technical terms of their law were of Scandinavian origin. When at length the “custom” of Normandy appears in writing, it takes its place among other French customs, and this although for a long time past Normandy has formed one of the dominions of a prince, between whom and the king of the French there has been little love and frequent war; and the peculiar characteristics which mark off the custom of Normandy from other French customs seem due much rather to the legislation of Henry of Anjou than to any Scandinavian tradition.7
Norman law was feudal.To say that the law of Normandy was mainly French is to say that it was feudal. But feudalism