seems so great an hardship to separate them, and to deprive thereby the
family of all means of subsisting, that nothing could be more generally
desired nor more reasonably allowed than an inheritance; and this
reasonableness was strongly enforced by the great change wrought in
their affairs when life-estates were granted. Whilst according to the
ancient custom lands were only given for a year, there was a rotation so
quick that every family came in its turn to be easily provided for, and
had not long to wait; but the children of a tenant for life, when they
lost the benefit of their father's possession, saw themselves as it
were immured upon every side by the life-estates, and perceived no
reasonable hope of a provision from any new arrangement. These
inheritances began very early in England. By a law of King Alfred it
appears that they were then of a very ancient establishment: and as such
inheritances were intended for great stability, they fortified them by
charters; and therefore they were called Book-land. This was done with
regard to the possession of the better sort: the meaner, who were called
_ceorles_, if they did not live in a dependence on some thane, held
their small portions of land as an inheritance likewise,--not by
charter, but by a sort of prescription. This was called Folk-land. These
estates of inheritance, both the greater and the meaner, were not fiefs;
they were to all purposes allodial, and had hardly a single property of
a feud; they descended equally to all the children, males and females,
according to the custom of gavelkind, a custom absolutely contrary to
the genius of the feudal tenure; and whenever estates were granted in
the later Saxon times by the bounty of the crown with an intent that
they should be inheritable, so far were they from being granted with the
complicated load of all the feudal services annexed, that in all the
charters of that kind which subsist they are bestowed with a full power
of alienation, _et liberi ab omni seculari gravamine_. This was the
general condition of those inheritances which were derived from the