to the land on which they dwelt. If you had enquired as to the conditions on which the castle, the cottages and the common were held, you would have found that they all formed a division of land called the Manor of Birmingham. The Lord of the manor, then Peter de Birmingham, held his land on terms of military or knight service, that is, for every quantity of land called a knight's fee (which quantity being as much as was worth £20 a year when measured in money value, necessarily varied with the quality and situation of the land), he was bound to find a fully equipped knight, or two yeomen, for service in the field for forty days in the year His immediate lord was Gervase Paganell, from whom Peter appears to have held nine knights' fees. Gervase, himself, held directly from the Crown.

This military service was the return, or rent or land-tax which the State (then represented by the King as chief lord of all the lords of the realm) exacted from the owners of land by knight service. The cottagers, whose dwellings lay below the castle where Digbeth and Deritend are now, were, no doubt, freemen (four are mentioned in Doomsday Book more than a century before) who held their lands on condition of rendering small fixed rents in money or in agricultural produce, and the rest of them, the villiens (of whom five are mentioned in Doomsday) who were bound to services to the lord of the Manor of a kind both servile in their nature and uncertain as to their quantity. In supplying produce or tilling his lands whilst he performed military service, these cottagers and villiens as surely sustained the military force. of the realm, although in a different manner, as a member of this Society does who has to pay an additional income-tax in consequence of the late Egyptian expedition. (It is worthy of notice in passing, that whilst in Aston, Erdington, Witton, besides villiens and cottagers there were a lower class of bondmen, there is no mention made of bondmen either in Birmingham or Edgbaston.)

The dwellers in the castle and the cottage were thus subject to the rights of the State. There remained that part of the manor which was not the lord's domain, cultivated for him, viz, the waste or common lands.

Now, how great is the change. The castle is gone, although it is still marked by "Moat Lane" and "Moat Row." The military services by which the lord of the manor held his lands have been abolished by statute. The non-military services by which the rest of the inhabitants held their lands, gradually became obsolete. The common lands have been enclosed, and the attenuated rights of the lord of the manor were, a few years ago, purchased by the Corporation. Now every landowner in Birmingham holds either by a freehold or leasehold tenure. If by freehold tenure he has theoretically something less than the absolute ownership; but practically he is absolute owner, subject in some cases to a merely nominal land tax. As to the leaseholds, on which tenure nine-tenths of modern Birmingham has been built, and of which the tenure is as secure as freehold, and in the point of devolution after death much more convenient, such a tenure was not, until the reign of Henry the Third, recognised as giving any interest in the land, but as a personal contract only between the landlord and tenant.

In order, however, that we may trace how, and in what manner this great change took place, let us look a little at the incidents of land ownership seven centuries ago, and contrast such incidents with the present ones. These incidents naturally distribute

themselves under the two heads of

1. The conditions of tenure (services, and rents and obligations). 2. The disposing power of the tenants. This again subdivides itself into

1---The extension of the power.

2.-The mode of its exercise.

As to the conditions of tenure, I have already indicated the two main divisions. The nobility and gentry rendered services to the Crown, the yeomen, and the class below the yeoman (the villiens), speaking generally, rendered either agricultural produce or did agricultural or servile work to the military class. Money rents were small and rare, because money was scarce, and what we now call personal property, which, in its modern varieties of merchandize, machinery, stocks and shares is now of such enormous value,

was then chiefly represented only by agricultural stock, household furniture, horses and armour. There were, however, certain conditions of tenure which could only be fulfilled by money payments. The chief of these were (1) reliefs, (2) aids.

A relief was a money fine based on the theory that by the death of the tenant his lands lapsed again into the hands of his feudal superior, and if that superior allowed the heir of the tenant to continue the tenancy he was entitled to a compensation for so doing. In the reign of Henry the Second as Glanville, his Chief Justiciar informs us (IX. c. 4.), that the right of the heir to succeed was absolute if and when he paid or tendered the amount of the relief, and this was fixed at a fourth of the value of the lands in the case of a knight, and at one year's value in the case of a free tenant below the rank of a knight. In addition to the relief which the heir of Peter de Birmingham would have to pay at his death, Peter during his life, was subject to other exactions for the benefit of his superior lord; and in his turn was entitled to exact corresponding contributions from his own tenants for "aids," as they were called. The occasions on which aids could be exacted were ultimately settled to be (1) ransom of the lord if he were taken captive, (2) making his eldest son a knight, and (3) marrying once his eldest daughter. What Peter had to pay for the two latter purposes we do not know, but in the year 1193 he had to pay an amount equal to one-twentieth of the annual value of his lands and one-fourth of his movables, for the ransom of Richard the First, which is equivalent to a property tax of one shilling in the pound, and an income tax of five shillings in the pound. There were several other burdensome consequences of military tenure, of a nature too technical to be explained in a very rapid survey such as this. But all the burdens, small and great, of the old military tenures were abolished at the Restoration, after having remained suspended during the Commonwealth. In the meantime the burdens of the non-military tenures had been gradually lightened in the mode to be presently described.

As to the disposing power of the owner of lands seven centuries

course, treason. If Peter of Birmingham died without heirs, his manor would lapse into the hands of Gervase Paganell, and if Gervase had died in like condition, all his manors and lands would have lapsed to the King, from whom he held them.

Again, the forms of conveying lands seven centuries ago, were based on the theory that all such transactions were matters which concerned the whole community, and therefore required that every transfer should be effected by the public ceremony of delivery of possession. A transfer by a deed, known only to the parties themselves and the lawyer who prepared it, was as foreign to the conceptions of an inhabitant of Birmingham in the twelfth century as a railway or a telegraph. There were deeds in those lays, but they were records of antecedent transfer by the "livery of seisin," and not, as they are now, the transfers themselves. They have become so only, as we shall see, by the constant and increasing pressure of convenience amounting to necessity, at first evading, and finally triumphing over and abolishing the old forms.

I may, I trust, assume that the first proposition is proved, that ince the twelfth century individual ownership has gained a complete victory over the rights of the State and the Community.

Now let us proceed to the second proposition, that this substitution of individual for collective ownership has been brought about, not so much by express legislation as by what has been correctly termed the "silent working of economic laws."

The "note" of the feudal system was that the price of the ownership of land was, as to the military tenures, personal military service. As to the non-military tenures, and as to the Treemen, fixed rents in kind or in money, or definite agricultural services; and as to the villiens, uncertain or servile services-money rents being then the rarest of all kinds of return.

What sapped the system was the substitution of money payments for services and rents in kind-in other words-the rise and progress of the commercial principle. Even at the time we have chosen for comparison, which is treated by modern writers as the