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Updated: June 14, 2025
One of them, which may be called the old way, is a methodical study of the general system of law, and of its grounds and reasons, beginning with the fundamental law of estates and tenures, and pursuing the derivative branches in logical succession, and the collateral subjects in due order; by which the student acquires a knowledge of principles that rule in all departments of the science, and learns to feel as much as to know what is in harmony with the system and what not.
The design of the provision, was to throw up a barrier against Governmental aggrandizement. The right to "take property" for State uses is one thing; the right so to adjust the tenures by which property is held, that each may have his own secured to him, is another thing, and clearly within the scope of legislation.
"A greater acquisition to the civil property of this kingdom than even Magna Charta itself, since that only pruned the luxuriances that had grown out of military tenures, and thereby preserved them in vigor; but the statute of King Charles extirpated the whole, and demolished both root and branches."
The science of law, especially, he held to be an alphabet which any man of common sense and business habits could as easily master as he could count five on his fingers; and there was no end to his ridicule of the men with horse-hair head-dresses, and their quirks, quiddits, cases, tenures, and such-like devil's lingo.
To regard them as the things themselves, or as constituent parts of them, leads to endless fallacies. Mere political disabilities are often confounded with slavery; so are many relations, and tenures, indispensible to the social state. We will specify some of these. PRIVATION OF SUFFRAGE. Then minors are slaves. INELIGIBILITY TO OFFICE. Then females are slaves.
The tenures of wards and liveries had long been regarded as a grievous burden by the nobility and gentry: several attempts had been made during the reign of James to purchase this prerogative, together with that of purveyance: and two hundred thousand pounds a year had been offered that prince in lieu of them; wardships and purveyance had been utterly abolished by the republican parliament; and even in the present parliament before the king arrived in England, a bill had been introduced offering him a compensation for the emolument of these prerogatives.
The result of this process is partly legal and partly constitutional or political. The legal result is the introduction of an elaborate system of customs, tenures, rights, duties, profits, and jurisdictions. The constitutional result is the creation of several intermediate links between the body of the nation and the king, in the place of or side by side with the duty of allegiance.
"The court-baron is a court incident to every manor in the kingdom, to beholden by the steward within the said manor. This court-baron is of two natures; the one is a customary court, of which we formerly spoke, appertaining entirely to the copy-holders, in which their estates are transferred by surrender and admittance, and other matters transacted relative to their tenures only.
That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared in former times, partly, because doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed in the laws to property, and such a structure given to our usages as allowed the rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep them poor; but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly the only interest for the consideration of the State is persons; that property will always follow persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men; and if men can be educated, the institutions will share their improvement and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land.
Upon the whole, I found that the Revolution had much improved the condition of the farmers, having relieved them from feudal tenures and lay-tithes. Oh the other hand, some of the proprietors, even in the neighbourhood of Calais, had lost nearly the whole of the rents, under the interpretation of the law respecting what were to be considered as feudal impositions.
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