making use of their manors[564], and the Westminster Statute is as positive as to neighbours; 'multi domini hucusque ... impediti extiterunt,' etc. It seems hardly possible to doubt that the enactments really represent a new departure, although the way towards it had been prepared by the collision of interests in open Court. The condition negatively indicated by the documents in regard to the time before these enactments cannot be dismissed by the consideration that the lord would derogate from his grant by approving. Although a single trial may bear directly on the relation between the lord and only one of the tenants or a few of them, every change in the occupation of the land touches all those who are members of the manorial community. The removal of difficulties as to approvement was, before the Statute of Merton, not a question of agreement between two persons, but a question as to the relative position of the lord and of the whole body of the tenantry. The lord might possibly settle with every tenant singly, but it seems much more probable that he brought the matter, when it arose, before the whole body with which the management of the village husbandry rested, that is, before the halimote, with its free and unfree tenants. In any case, the influence of the free tenants as recognised by the common law was decisive, and hardly to be reconciled with the usual feudal notions as to the place occupied by the lord in the community. It must be noted that even that order of things which came into being in consequence of the Statute contains an indirect testimony as to the power of the village community. The Act requires the pasture left to the free tenants to be sufficient, and it may be asked at once, what criterion was there of such a sufficiency, if the number of beasts was not mentioned in the instrument by which the common was held. Of course, in case of dispute, a jury had to give a verdict about it, but what had the jury to go by? It was not the actual number of heads of cattle on a tenement that could be made the starting-point of calculation. Evidently the size of the holding, and its relation to other holdings, had to be taken into account. But if so, then the legal admeasurement had to conform to the customary admeasurement defined by the community[565]. And so again the openly recognised law of the kingdom had to be set in action according to local customs, which in themselves had no legally binding force. [Rights of common in woods, etc.]