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The origin of this evil state of affairs was the tenure of emphyteusis: its active and unfeeling promoters have been always the nobility and ecclesiastics, and its only powerful enemy, the only hope of the people, the Crown. After what has been mentioned it is unnecessary to speak of minor crimes of street assassinations, highway robberies and the like.
After the Western Empire had apparently fallen beneath the Northern arms that is to say, five hundred years later and not until then, the Roman Code ameliorated the baneful tenure of emphyteusis.
Not only does the proximity of so easily followed a model explain whence the Frankish and Lombard Sovereigns got the idea of securing the military service of their followers by granting away portions of their public domain; but it perhaps explains the tendency which immediately showed itself in the Benefices to become hereditary, for an Emphyteusis, though capable of being moulded to the terms of the original contract, nevertheless descended as a general rule to the heirs of the grantee.
Morally speaking their confinement may have been a humiliation; in sober fact it was an immense advantage; moreover, a special law of 'emphyteusis' made the leases of their homes inalienable, so long as they paid rent, and forbade the raising of the rent under any circumstances, while leaving the tenant absolute freedom to alter and improve his house as he would, together with the right to sublet it, or to sell the lease itself to any other Hebrew; and these leases became very valuable.
What growth of forest trees had followed the abolition of emphyteusis under the Gothic and Saracenic monarchs was destroyed under the government of Christian nobles, and to-day there is scarcely a tree in Portugal the woods, including fruit and nut trees, covering less than 400,000 out of 22,000,000 acres, the entire area of the country.
The plan was afterwards extensively imitated by individual proprietors, and the tenant, whose relation to the owner had originally been determined by his contract, was subsequently recognised by the Prætor as having himself a qualified proprietorship, which in time became known as an Emphyteusis. From this point the history of tenure parts into two branches.
She knew next to nothing of the condition of her people; she only imperfectly understood the relations in which they actually stood to herself, the extent of her power over them, and of their power over her. The mysteries of emphyteusis, emphyteuma, and emphyteuta were still hidden to her, though her steward spoke of them with surprising loquacity and fluency.
We have, therefore, in the Emphyteusis a striking example of the double ownership which characterised feudal property, and one, moreover, which is much simpler and much more easily imitated than the juxtaposition of legal and equitable rights. The history of the Roman tenure does not end, however, at this point.
See Tennyson's beautiful poem . Cf. King Lear, Act I, Sc. 2, vs. 15. Emphyteusis is the legal renting of ground; Stillicide, a continual dropping of water, as from the eaves of a house. These words, Emphyteusis and Stillicide, are terms in Roman Law. Worldly Wiseman. The character in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress , who meets Christian soon after his setting out from the City of Destruction.
We have clear evidence that between the great fortresses which, disposed along the line of the Rhine and Danube, long secured the frontier of the Empire against its barbarian neighbours, there extended a succession of strips of land, the agri limitrophi, which were occupied by veteran soldiers of the Roman army on the terms of an Emphyteusis. There was a double ownership.
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