[851] By a charter of enfranchisement a lord might introduce burgage tenure and abolish ‘servile customs’; but it must be, to say the least, doubtful whether he could, without the king’s licence, confer upon a village the public status of a borough and e.g. authorize it to behave like a hundred before the justices in eyre. This is one of the reasons why sheriffs can draw the line where they please, and why some towns which have been enfranchised never obtain a secure place in the list of parliamentary boroughs.
[852] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 630. When it is being said that if land in the borough escheats, it always escheats to the king, the mesne tenures are already being forgotten within the borough, just as in modern times we have forgotten them in the open country. The burgher’s power of devising his land made escheat a rare event, and so destroyed the evidence of mesne tenure.
[853] See above, [p. 212]. Also the king might give away an undivided share of the borough. Apparently the church of Worcester had received the third penny of the city ever since the day when the burh was wrought by the ealdorman and lady of the Mercians. See above, [p. 194].
[854] Ashley, Introduction to Fustel de Coulanges, Origin of Property in Land, p. vii.
[855] The gradual disappearance in recent times of the Irish language is no parallel case, for this is a triumph of the printing press. Mr Stevenson tells me that the number of unquestioned cases of a word borrowed from Celtic in very ancient times is now reduced to less than ten.
[856] Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Germanen, especially ii. 120 ff.
[857] We shall use, and cite by the letter K., Kemble’s Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici. We shall refer by the letters H. & S. to the third volume of the Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents edited by Haddan and Stubbs, by the letter T. to Thorpe’s Diplomatarium, by the letter B. to Birch’s Cartularium, by the letter E. to Earle’s Land Charters. Reference will also be made to the two collections of facsimiles, namely, the four volumes which come from the British Museum and the two which come from the Ordnance Survey. We are yet a long way off a satisfactory edition of the land-books. A model has been lately set by Prof. Napier and Mr Stevenson in their edition of the Crawford Collection of Early Charters, Oxford, 1895.
[858] Heming’s Cartulary was published by Hearne. It has been said that some of the documents in this collection which Kemble accepted as genuine commit the fault of supposing that the old episcopal minster was dedicated to St. Mary, whereas it was dedicated to St. Peter. See Robertson, Historical Essays, 195. However, where Heming’s work can be tested it generally gains credit.
[859] D. B. i. 173 b; K. 131 (i. 158); B. i. 311.
[860] D. B. i. 127; K. 230 (i. 297); B. i. 558.