After having said so much about different types of village com munities which occur in Europe it will be easier to analyse the incidents of English land tenure which disclose the working of similar conceptions and arrangements. Features which have been very prominent in the case of the Welsh, Slays, Germans or Scan dinavians recur in the English instances sometimes with equal force and at other times in a mitigated shape.
There are some vestiges of the purely tribal form of community on English soil. Many Saxon and Anglian place-names are derived from personal names, followed by the suffix ing, and closely re semble the common patronymics of Saxon and German families and kindreds. It is most probable, as Kemble supposed, that we have to do in most of these instances with tribal and family settlements, although the mere fact of belonging to a great land owner may have been at the root of some cases.
A very noticeable consequence of tribal habits in regard to land ownership is presented by the difficulties which stood in the way of alienation of land by the occupiers of it. The Old English legal system did not originally admit of any alienation of f olk land, land held by folkright, or, in other words, of the estates owned under the ordinary customary law of the people. Such land could not be bequeathed out of the kindred and could not be sold without the consent of the kinsmen. Such complete disabilities could not be upheld indefinitely, however, in a growing and pro gressive community, and we find the ancient folkright assailed from different points of view. The Church insists on the right of individual possessors to give away land for the sake of their souls; the kings grani exemption from folkright and constitute privileged estates held by charter and following in the main the rules of individualized Roman law; the wish of private persons to make provision for daughters and to deal with land as with other commodities produces constant collisions with the custom ary tribal views. Already, by the end of the Saxon period, trans fer and alienation of land make their way everywhere, and the Norman conquest brings these features to a head by substituting the notion of tenure—i.e., of an estate burdened with service to a superior—for the ancient notion of tribal folkland.
But although the tribal basis of communal arrangements was shaken and removed in England in comparatively early times, it had influenced the practices of rural husbandry and landholding, and in the modified form of the village community it survived right through the feudal period, leaving characteristic and material traces of its existence down to the present day.
To begin with, the open-field system with intermixture of strips and common rights in pasture and wood was the prevailing sys tem in England for more than a thousand years. Under the name of champion farming it existed everywhere in the country until the Enclosure Acts of the i8th and i9th centuries put an end to it ; it may be found in operation even now in some of its features in backward districts. It would have been absurd to build up these practices of compulsory rotation of crops, of a temporary relapse of plots into common pasture between harvest and plough ing time, of the interdependence of thrifty and negligent husband men, from the point of view of individual appropriation. On the other hand, it was the natural system for the apportionment of claims to the shareholders of an organic and perpetual joint stock company.
Practices of shifting arable are seldom reported in English evi dence. There are some traces of periodical redivisions of arable land in Northumberland: under the name of runrig such prac tices seem to have been not uncommon in the outer fields, the non-manured portions, of townships in Scotland, both among the Saxon inhabitants of the lowlands and the Celtic population of the highlands. The joining of small tenants for the purpose of coaration, for the formation of the big, heavy ploughs, drawn by eight oxen, sometimes caused a shifting in the possession of strips between the coparceners of the undertaking. But, as a rule, the arable was held in severalty by the different members of the township.
On the other hand, meadows were constantly owned by entire townships and distributed between the tenements entitled to shares from year to year either by lot or according to a definite order. These practices are in full vigour in some places even at the present day. Any person living in Oxford may witness the distribution by lot on Lammas day (Aug. 1) of the Lammas meadows, that is, the meadows inclosed for the sake of raising hay-grass in the village of Yarnton, some three miles to the north of Oxford.