It is not asserted that free suitors are necessary only in those cases where free tenants are concerned--it is the court as such which depends on the existence of such free suitors, the court which has largely, if not mostly, to deal with customary business, and consists to a great extent of customary tenants. And, curiously enough, when the court baron disengages itself from the halimot, the rule as to suitors, instead of applying in a special way to this court baron, for which it seems particularly fitted, extends to the notion of the manor itself, so that we are driven to ask why the manor is assumed to contain a certain number of free tenants and a court for them. Why is its existence denied where these elements are wanting? Reverting to the thirteenth century, we have to state similar puzzling questions: thus if one turns to the manorial surveys of the time, the freehold element seems to be relatively insignificant and more or less severed from the community; if one takes up the manorial rolls, the halimot is there with the emphatically expressed features and even the name of a court of villains; but when the common law is concerned, this same tribunal appears as a court of freeholders. The manors of the Abbey of Bec on English soil contained hardly any freeholders at all. Had the Abbey no courts? Had it no manors from the standpoint of Coke's theory? What were the halimots whose proceedings are recorded in the usual way on its manorial rolls? In presence of these flagrant contradictions I cannot help thinking that we here come across one of those interesting points where the two lines of feudal doctrine do not meet, and where different layers of theory may be distinguished. [Free suitors and freeholders.]