Sul, a plough; Stret, or Stræt, a street or public highway.
Wong, a meadow; Welig, a willow; Wegleast, a going out of the way; Wer, an enclosure.
As a whole the English language has changed more during the past century than at any time of the preceding ages. Railway and telegraph have brought all parts of the kingdom into closer contact, and intercourse with foreign countries accounts for constant alterations in language and customs. New words are introduced and old ones die out; it is the same in every language.
CHAPTER IV.
OLD DEEDS.
Among old family papers it is rare to meet with many dating further back than the Reformation; first of all, this may be accounted for by the enormous amount of land possessed by the monks, who, instead of having to search through deeds, entered these grants and gifts of property into their charter-book. The monastic estates, after the Dissolution, were managed through the Augmentation Office; many of the original deeds were destroyed or lost in the general confusion, and a new distribution of the lands took place by the King irrespective of the former owners, whose claims were totally ignored, although in such grants or deeds of gift the name of the monastery formerly owning the property is usually named.
The King must have realized large sums of money by these transactions, which were carried out through, and in the names of, his commissioners or agents, and not usually granted direct from the Crown; very little of the land confiscated from the abbeys was retained as royal property, but appears to have been almost immediately sold or granted away.
But to begin from the oldest reliable period at which deeds may refer to, is to go back to the Norman Conquest, or, rather, to the time when the lands had been distributed among the Norman noblemen, as described in the famous Domesday Book, compiled, it is said, between 1080 and 1085. Reference is therein made to previous Saxon possessors; but only in very few instances can any certain information be obtained of private property prior to the eleventh century.
Private deeds do exist between the time of William I. and Richard I.; from this latter King’s reign, about A.D. 1179, legal memory dates[2]; but usually the earliest family deeds are of Edward I., because then it was that the legal era was fixed to commence. This King has been, so far as regards manorial rights and customs, rightly called the ‘English Solon.’ He passed innumerable Acts of Parliament on the subject of legal matters; he revised the whole of the national laws, retaining but improving existing arrangements. A most interesting account of early English law and manorial customs is published by the Selden Society. It is very rare indeed to discover private deeds earlier than this; but, of course, every rule has its exception.