One of two things, either the shares exist only as a survival of the servile arrangement out of which the free tenements may have grown, or else they exist primarily for the purpose not of assessing duties but of apportioning claims. In stating these possibilities I must repeat what I said before, that it would be quite wrong to bring all the observed phenomena under one head. I do not intend in the least to deny that the freer play of economic and legal forces within the range of free ownership must have produced combinations infinitely more varying, irregular and complicated than those which are to be found in villainage. A large margin must be allowed for such modifications which dispersed and altered the duties that were originally proportioned to shares. But a few simple questions will serve to show that other elements must be brought into the reckoning. Why should the disruptive tendency operate so much more against proportionate assessment than against the distribution into shares itself; in other words, why are equal tenements so much commoner than equal rents? If shareholding and equal rents were indissolubly connected as the two sides of one thing, or even as cause and effect, why should one hold its ground when the other had disappeared, and how could the dependent element remain widely active when the principal one had lost its meaning? If the discrepancies between rent and shares had been casual, we might try to explain them entirely by later modifications. But these discrepancies are a standing feature of the surveys, and it seems to me that we can hardly escape the inference that shareholding has its _raison d'être_ quite apart from the duties owed to the lord, and in this case we have to look to the communal arrangement of proprietary rights for its explanation; it was a means of giving to every man his due. If this principle is granted, all the observable facts fall into their right places. One can easily imagine how free holdings came to exist within the village community in spite of their loose connexion with the manor. In regard to duties, they were practically outside the community; not so as to proprietary rights and the agricultural arrangements proceeding from them, for example such arrangements as affected the rotation of crops, the use of commons and fallow pasture, the setting up of hedges, the repair of dykes, etc. There is no real contradiction between the facts, that in relation to the lord every free shareholder was, as it were, bound by a separate and private agreement, while in relation to the village he had to conform to communal rule.