Thus it seems that in the very nature of things the permanent equality of the holdings in yard-lands (or double, or half yard-lands), on a manor, was a proof that the tenure was servile, and that the community was not a free village community. For imagine a free village community taking equal lots, and holding these lots, as land of inheritance, by allodial tenure, and with (what seems to have been the universal custom of Teutonic nations as regards land of inheritance) equal division among heirs, how could the _equality_ be possibly maintained? One holder of a yard-land would have seven sons, and another two, and another [p178] one. How could equality be maintained generation after generation? What could prevent the multiplication of intricate subdivisions among heirs, breaking up the yard-lands into smaller bundles of all imaginable sizes? Even if a certain equality could be restored, which is very unlikely, at intervals, by a _re-division_, which should reverse the inequality produced by the rule of inheritance, what would become of the _yard-lands_? How could the contents of the yard-land remain the same on the same estate for hundreds of years, notwithstanding the increase in the number of sharers in the land of the free village community? We may take it, then, as inherently certain that the system of yard-lands is a system involving in its continuance a _servile origin_. The community of holders of yard-lands we may regard as a community of servile tenants, without any strict rights of inheritance--in theory tenants at the will of their lord, becoming by custom _adscripti glebæ_, and therefore tenants for life, and by still longer custom gaining a right of single undivided succession by primogeniture, or something very much like it. «Result of the Saxon evidence.» Now we know that the holdings were _yard-lands_ and the holders _geburs_, rendering the customary _gafol_ and _week-work_ to their lords, in the time of King Ine, if we may trust the genuineness of his 'laws.' There was but an interval of 100 years between Ine and Ethelbert; whilst Ine lived as near to the first conquest of large portions of the middle districts of England as Ethelbert did to the conquest of Kent. «No room for a system of free village communities, which afterwards sank into serfdom.»