One of the inevitable consequences of the process was a confusion in legal ideas. Distinctions which in the classical Roman law were clearly drawn became obliterated in the Middle Ages. Ownership and sovereignty, rents and taxes, public and private rights, became blended together in one large, hazy, undistinguished concept. Even the contrast between freedom and unfreedom which appears to the modern mind so elementary and so logical did not fit the intricate economic facts of the eleventh century. Of freedom there were many grades and many criteria. In one sense the villein was free, in another sense unfree, as a combination of forces fiscal, economic, penal were assimilating the rural population free and servile to the hybrid type. "Freedom is measured along several different scales. At one time it is to the power of alienation or withdrawal that attention is attracted, at another to the number and kind of services and 'customs' that the man must render to his lord." The closer the facts of Domesday were scrutinised the more impossible did it appear to arrive at exact definitions. Maitland's subtle powers of analysis were never shown to better advantage than in this attempt to rethink "the common thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about common things." We doubt whether any historian had ever set himself down so seriously to get inside the medieval mind. The pompous phraseology in the early _diplomata_ does not deceive him, for he knows that the romanesque terms neither express the thoughts nor represent the facts of a barbarian age. Large phrases confidently used by modern historians, such as "property" or "joint liability," must be closely scrutinised before they can be applied to a remote age; property is a bundle of rights, and with every advance in economic progress, in material aspirations, in intellectual definition, rights and powers multiply, the conception of _dominium_ becomes more intensive, fuller of content and discriminations. There is no fixed immutable limit to the implications of such a concept. The Saxon chieftain learnt the extent of his powers in the process of alienating them to the Church, as some African chieftain tempted by gin and rifles may acquire a knowledge that land is not made for sheep alone, but may also yield gold and diamonds. But as the barbarian is vague, so also he is for all his materialism an idealist. "He sees things not as they are but as they might conveniently be. Every householder has a hide; every hide has 120 acres of arable; every hide is worth one pound a year; every householder has a team; every team is of eight oxen; every team is worth one pound. If all this be not so, then it ought to be so, and must be deemed to be so. Then by a Procrustean system he packs the complex and irregular facts into his scheme!" It is no light enterprise to understand the puzzled and inadequate thought which lies at the basis of our social history; Maitland believed that the reward was