that its general meaning is _the giver of bread_(57). Now herein lurks something which has greatly affected all later political and social arrangements. The institution of the _comitatus_ in its first state had nothing whatever to do with the holding of land. But the _man_ looked for reward of his faithful service at the hands of his _lord_; he looked for the bread of which his lord’s title proclaimed him as the giver. There was of course no form of reward, no form of _bread_, so convenient or so honourable as that of a grant of land to be held as the reward of past and the condition of future service. Moreover the custom of granting out lands to be held by the tenure of military service had become common in the later days of Roman power(58). Such lands were of course held, not of the Emperor as a personal lord, but of the Roman Commonwealth of which he was the head and representative. But the custom of holding lands by military service fell in well with the Teutonic institution of personal service, and the union of the two in the same person produced that feudal relation which has had such an important bearing on all political and social life through the whole of the middle ages and down to our own time. The land granted by the lord to his man, or the land which the man agreed to hold as if it had been so granted, might be a kingdom held of the Emperor or the Pope, or it might be the smallest estate held of a more powerful neighbour. In either case, such a holding by military service was a _fief_, and from the institution of such fiefs the so-called Feudal System, with all its manifold workings for good and for evil, had its rise. But so far as the Feudal System existed, either in England or in any other country, it existed wholly as a system which had grown up by the side of an earlier system which it wholly or partially displaced. The feudal tenant, holding his land of a lord by military service gradually supplanted, wholly or partially, in most countries of Europe, the _allodial_ holder who held his land of no other man, and who knew no superior but God and the Law(59). In England this change took place only gradually and partially; it was through the Norman Conquest, or, more accurately, through the subtle legal theories which came in with the Norman Conquest, that it was finally established. And, after all, it was rather in theory than in fact that it was established. The Feudal System, as something spreading into every corner of the land, and affecting every relation of life, never obtained the same complete establishment in England which it did in some continental countries.