But feudal principles would tend towards single succession outwardly.
That as time went on the growing force of feudal principles would demand single succession to landed estates whenever they could be regarded as benefices is what might be expected. And it is worth noting that under later feudal custom, by a kind of compromise, what was really a family holding was often artificially moulded for practical purposes into a single holding with apparent single succession.
A single holding may cover internal family divisions.
In the Domesday survey are many instances in which thanes or soldiers here and there hold manors or fractions of manors ‘pariter’ or ‘in paragio.’ And when the feudal tenancy ‘in parage’ is examined in its fully developed form on the Continent, it is found to present many resemblances to what under Cymric custom the family holding of a tribal chief of kindred might be if the chief alone were regarded as the landed person doing homage to the superior lord for all his kindred and if, in the next stage, when the gwely was internally divided between brothers, one of them only did homage for the rest. There were indeed in tribal custom as to the chieftainship and the constitution of the gwely traits which easily allowed themselves to be developed on feudal lines. For the present purpose, however, the point seems to be that within what looks from the outside like a single individual landholding there may have been internal family divisions which are not apparent.
Passing now from what may be regarded as the holdings of the twelve-hynde class, more or less tending to resemble manorial estates, to the yardlands of the twy-hynde class, room may perhaps be found even in their case for the exceptional continuance of the family element in spite of the apparent single succession.
Kentish family holdings.
The Kentish holdings in sulungs and yokes instead of in hides and yardlands seem to go back to the earliest Kentish records. The fact that, in spite of the difference in date between the evidence of the earliest charters and that of the Domesday survey and the surveys in the Battle Abbey records and the ‘Black Book of St. Augustine,’ the holdings seem to have been throughout in sulungs and yokes points to continuity. And when these sulungs and yokes in the surveys are found to be very often held by ‘the heredes of so and so,’ or ‘so and so and his pares,’ it seems fair to suggest that in these Kentish holdings there may have been a survival of family ownership.
Whether it were so or not, this later Kentish evidence shows at least that the continuance of family holdings was not necessarily inconsistent with external uniformity in the sulungs and yokes of the open-field system in Kent. And if so, why may not the same thing be true in exceptional cases of the hides and yardlands of Wessex and Mercia?
Contrary principles have a strange way in practice of finding a modus vivendi till one of them at last overrides the other.
Gavelkind holdings were family holdings.