Mr. Seebohm has not, perhaps, been so convincing in the explanation he has to offer of the origin of the manor; but there is now a marked tendency to accept what is, after all, his main contention--that the manorial system was in existence, not as an exceptional phenomenon, but as the prevailing form of social organisation _very soon_, at any rate, after the English Conquest. There is absolutely no clear documentary evidence for the free village community in England. As to the word _mark_, not even Kemble, who first introduced it to English readers, could produce an example of its use in English documents in the sense of land owned by a community; and Anglo-Saxon scholars now point out that his one doubtful instance of _mearcmót_ [A.D. 971] and his three examples of _mearcbeorh_ are most naturally explained as having to do with _mark_ merely in the sense of a boundary.[1] Not only is there no early evidence; the arguments based on supposed survivals into later times seem to melt away on close examination. It has, for instance, been maintained that even in the Domesday Survey there are traces of free communities. But the supposed Domesday references are of the scantiest, and certainly would not suggest the mark to anyone who was not looking for it. Most of them seem easily susceptible of other interpretations; in some of them we probably have to do with two or three joint-owners, in others very possibly with villages where the lord has been bought out.[2] Another and more usual argument is derived from the Court Baron, which was described by later legal theory as absolutely essential to a manor, and yet of such a constitution that it could not be held unless there were at least two free tenants to attend it. But legal historians are beginning to regard the Court Baron as not at all primitive, but rather as a comparatively late outcome of feudal theory.[3]