for their prevalent authority in the constitution of the tribunal. [Surrender and admittance.] The conveyancing entries, although barren and monotonous at first sight, are very important, in so far as they show, better perhaps than anything else, the part played by the community and by its testimony in the transmission of rights. It has become a common-place to argue that the practice of surrender and admittance characterises the absolute ownership that the lord has in the land held in villainage, and proceeds from the fact that every holder of servile land is in truth merely an occupier of the plot by precarious tenure. Every change of occupation has to be performed through the medium of the lord who 're-enters' the tenement, and concedes it again as if there had been no previous occupation at all and the new tenant entered on a holding freshly created for his use. None the less, a theory which lays all the stress in the case on the surrender into the hand of the lord, and explains this act from the point of view of absolute ownership, is wrong in many respects. [Meaning of surrender.] To begin with the legal transmission of a free holding, although the element of surrender has as it were evaporated from it, it is quite as much bound up with the fiction of the absolute ownership of the lord as is the surrender and admittance of villains and copyholders. The ceremony of investiture had no other meaning but that of showing that the true owner re-entered into the exercise of his right, and every act of homage for land was connected with an act of feoffment which, though obligatory, first by custom and then by law, was nevertheless no mere pageant, because it gave rise to very serious claims of service and casual rights in the shape of wardship, marriage, and the like. The king who wanted to be everybody's heir was much too consequent an exponent of the feudal doctrine, and his successors were forced into a gentler practice. But the fiction of higher ownership was lurking behind all these contentions of the upper class quite as much as behind the conveyancing ceremonies of the manorial court. And in both cases the fiction stretched its standard of uniformity over very different elements: allodial ownership was modified by a subjection to the 'dominium directum,' on the one hand; leases and precarious occupation were crystalised into tenure, on the other. It is not my object to trace the parallel of free and peasant holding in its details, but I lay stress on the principle that the privileged tenure involved the notion of a personal concession quite as much as did the base tenure, and that this fundamental notion made itself felt both in conveyancing formalities and in practical claims. [The rod and the festuca.]