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Nine-tenths of the farms of Norway and Sweden are owned by small proprietors; and although the right to dispose of landed property is relatively free, the laws of the country favor the retention of the farms in the families possessing them. An old allodial right makes it possible to redeem at an appraised value a farm that has been sold.
Meantime, the principle of heredity the principle that benefices should go down from father to son, or to the next heir had gained a firm footing. Another fact was that the royal offices became hereditary, and were transmitted to the heirs of allodial property. Thus the exercise of government and the possession of land were linked together.
Also, "The same regulation, concerning the distribution of justice by the intervention of juries, . . .were introduced into the baron courts of the king, as into those of the nobility, or such of his subjects as retained their allodial property." Same, p. 337. Same, vol. 2, p. 292. Same, vol. 2, p. 293-4. Same, vol. 1, ch. 12, p. 329.
The primitive German or allodial property is strictly reserved to the kindred. Not only is it incapable of being disposed of by testament but it is scarcely capable of being alienated by conveyance inter vivos.
Our Saxon ancestors held their lands, as they did their personal property, in absolute dominion, disencumbered with any superior, answering nearly to the nature of those possessions which the Feudalists term Allodial. William the Norman first introduced that system generally.
An Act passed in 1830 provides and declares that all lands within the State "are allodial, so that, subject only to the liability to escheat, the entire and absolute property is vested in the owners according to the nature of their respective estates." By this Act "all feudal tenures of every description, with all their incidents," were "abolished."
So harsh and cunning a design, we doubt not, never entered the minds of any former legislators, even in pagan antiquity. The great stimulus to exertion in civil society consists of the acquisition of property, chiefly of land. In feudal times seignorial estates could be purchased by none but those of noble blood; but with allodial estates it was different all through Europe.
Gaius himself observes upon the splitting of dominion into two parts as a singularity of Roman law, and expressly contrasts it with the entire or allodial ownership to which other nations were accustomed.
Allodial property, at least with the mass of coparceners, was originally held, then, in equal shares; for all of the prizes were equal, or, at least, equivalent. This property, like that of the Romans, was wholly individual, independent, exclusive, transferable, and consequently susceptible of accumulation and invasion.
LOTHAR OF SAXONY. The princes over whom Henry V. had exercised a severe control opposed the elevation of Frederick of Hohenstaufen, the son of his sister Agnes. He allowed all the Pope's claims, and was crowned at Rome by Innocent II., accepting the allodial possessions of Matilda of Tuscany, as a fief from the pontiff.
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