freeholders, some not, that in some there were courts, in others none, and that no general proposition respecting either jurisdictional rights or agrarian continuity would apply to them universally. That the manors of Domesday were mainly tilled by villeins who in a certain sense were unfree, was doubtless true, but there was evidence to show that the position of the agricultural class had deteriorated during the period which elapsed between the Conquest and the survey, and many calamities natural or fiscal, a murrain, a hailstorm, a levy of Danegeld, a judicial fine, might be enumerated to account for a gradual decline in the status of the rural population during the Saxon age. Evidence from an entirely different quarter supported the main conclusion. Far back at the beginning of the eighth century Bede had spoken of the hide as the normal holding of the English householder. By a train of very subtle and elaborate calculations Maitland came to the conclusion that the hide of which Bede spoke and to which Domesday testifies contained 120 arable acres,--a tenement too large for any serf or semi-servile _colonus_ and therefore precluding the idea that the manorial system was dominant in England in very early Saxon times. How then did the system arise? Maitland advanced an ingenious hypothesis, admitting, "that nothing which could be called a strict proof could be offered"--that the word _manerium_ as used by the Domesday commissioners possessed a technical sense. Domesday was a fiscal inquest; the object of the commissioners was the collection of geld; geld is collected from persons who live in houses and the word _manerium_ means a house. For the fiscal purpose of these Norman officials _manerium_ meant "the house at which geld is charged." The lord, in other words, was made responsible to the state for the payment of geld from his demesne land and the land of his villeins, and was bound to take measures to see that the tax was paid by such freemen and socmen as might be attached to his manor. The theory was not of course intended to provide a solution for the main problem. It suggested an answer to the question "What is the technical meaning attached to the word _manerium_ in Domesday?" it revealed one of the possible forces which may have contributed to manorial dependence: but it did not explain or pretend to explain either the forces which made for the subjection of the peasantry to seignorial justice or the peculiar system of ownership and cultivation which was distinctive of the manor.