It is curious to observe how slow English scholars have been to realise the importance of these recent volumes. Is it because theories of mediæval history, which are not more than twenty or thirty years old, have already hardened into dogma, and we shrink from the reconstruction which might be necessary were we to meddle with any of the corner-stones? Some consolation, however, may be found in the fact that a considerable effect has been produced by the work of an English investigator, who was quite independently arriving, though from a different point of view, at very similar conclusions. Mr. Seebohm’s _English Village Community_, it is no exaggeration to say, revealed to us, for the first time, the inner life of mediæval England. By making us realise not only how uniform was the manorial system over the greater part of England, but also how burdensome were the obligations of the tenants, it forced us to reconsider the accepted explanation of its origin. For the explanation generally accepted was that manors had come into existence piecemeal, by the gradual subjection, here in one way, there in another, of the free landowners to their more powerful neighbours. Mr. Seebohm made it appear probable that the lord of the manor, instead of being a late intruder, was from the first, so far as England was concerned, the owner of the soil and the lord of those who tilled it; that the development has been in the main and from the first an advance from servitude to freedom; and not an elevation after long centuries of increasing degradation.