But this must not blind our eyes to the fact that the yardlands on Anglo-Saxon estates were, so far as we can see, for the most part really individual holdings with actual single succession. However hard tribal custom may have fought for the family element, the manorial element in the end seems to have prevailed on most manors so as to secure, for the purposes of the lordship and the convenience of manorial management, single succession to the yardlands. The fact that as early as King Ine’s time we see new individual holdings of geburs being made by the allotment of yardlands and homesteads to individual tenants in return for gafol and work, when taken in connection with the ‘Rectitudines’ brings us back to the likeness of these holdings to the holdings of the _villani_ of later times. We see in the allotment of stock to the gebur, of which we trace scattered evidence, the fact on which the principle of the later villenage was based. Only when both homestead and yardland came from the lord was there to be work as well as gafol under King Ine’s laws. The stock of the holding according to the ‘Rectitudines’ belonged in theory to the lord and upon the tenant’s death returned to the lord. The continuance to another tenant on the payment of a relief involved the admission that the holding and its outfit were a loan from the lord. [Sidenote: The manorial element must not be lost sight of.] The fact that in exceptional cases family holdings were able to maintain their own under manorial management must not be allowed to lead us to underrate the power of the manorial element. There were in tribal custom itself as described by Tacitus elements of what we have elsewhere spoken of as the embryo manor, but this must not blind our eyes to the fact that something more was required to produce the general uniformity of holdings and single succession upon manorial estates than tribal custom working alone. If from a tribal point of view we try to understand the growth of manorial serfdom and see how on the Continent it was seemingly the result of the combination of two leading factors, tribal custom and Roman methods of land management, it becomes hardly possible to ignore the presence of something like the same combination of two interacting factors on British or English ground.