We have already seen it proved, from contemporary laws, that the germ of at least one of England’s freest and most important institutions was to be found, as early as the ninth century, among the numerous Danes and Norwegians settled in that country, to whose successors and kinsmen may be justly ascribed the honour of further developing the institution of trial by jury. In like manner contemporary chronicles bear witness that these Danish and Norwegian settlements in many ways essentially contributed to promote political liberty and the spirit of freedom. According to that remarkable document, Domesday-Book, there was, about twenty years after the Norman conquest, a greater number of independent landed proprietors, if not, in the strictest sense of the word, freeholders, in the districts occupied by the Danes, and under the Danelag, than in the other, or Anglo-Saxon, part of England. The smaller Anglo-Saxon agriculturists were frequently serfs, though, for the most part, perhaps, leaseholders, or holding other subordinate situations; whilst the Danish settlers, being conquerors, were mostly freemen, and, in general, proprietors of the soil. Domesday-Book mentions, under the name of “Sochmanni,” a numerous class of landowners, or peasants, in the Danish districts north-east of Watlinga-Stræt, who, to the south of that line, and even then only just upon the borders of it, are rarely to be found, (viz., in Buckinghamshire, 19, and in Surrey, 9). It also mentions a great number of freemen in those districts, or, as they are called in Latin, “liberi homines.” Neither _Sochmanni_ nor _liberi homines_ seem, however, to have been freeholders, in the present sense of that term. They certainly stood in a sort of feudal relation to a superior lord; but in such a manner that the “Sochmanni” may be best compared with our present hereditary lessees. Their farms passed by inheritance to their sons, they paying certain rents, and performing certain feudal duties; but the feudal lord had no power to dispose of the property as he pleased. The counties occupied by the Danes and Norwegians, viz., Northumberland, Durham, Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire, are not mentioned in Domesday-Book. In the other fifteen counties to the north and east of Watlinga-Stræt, the “Sochmanni” and “liberi homines” are summed up as follows (see Turner’s “History of the Anglo-Saxons”):— Essex Sochmanni 343 liberi 306 homines Suffolk Sochmanni 1,014 liberi 8,012 homines Norfolk Sochmanni 5,521 liberi 4,981 homines Cambridge Sochmanni 245 Hertford " 57