It was competent, as I have Greenwich in the County of Kent." already said, for the lord of each manor to prescribe the services by which his tenants were to hold under him. But, as there is nothing to indicate any peculiar tenures as belonging to that particular manor, we are led to conclude, both by analogy and by what we know of the action of the colonists afterwards, that the importance of this provision turns upon its reference to the County of Kent. It is historically true that some portions of England never came under the feudal organization to which the other parts of the kingdom were subjected. The County of Kent was one of these, and doubtless Hampton Court and Windsor were in the same category. The consequence was that most, if not all, the local Saxon institutions in force in that county when William landed, remained in vigor until the feudal system was abolished in 1672, as I have mentioned. Every thing in relation to holding of land, except the fealty which all land-owners owed to the king, was free. The owner could freely alienate it, and he could devise it by will, which could not be done in other parts of England until about the middle of the sixteenth century. If he died, instead of his estate descending to a single heir by virtue of the right of primogeniture, which prevailed generally in England, it was shared equally by all the sons, if any, and otherwise by the daughters.

Here, then, we have the full force and meaning of this otherwise unexplained clause in the American charters. Nothing like feudal vassalage under them could or did ever find root on the American soil. Her lands were not only free in their tenure, but free also of alienation by deed or by will, without asking permission of even the crown or its officers, since the king by his charter had waived all claims to have them held in capite. And it ignored the principle of primogeniture in the division of undevised lands, whereby the eldest son took the entire lands of the father. And doubtless that single clause had not a little to do in giving character to the institutions of New England, as well as in cherishing that sense of freedom and self-respect which springs from the independent ownership of the acres which one tills for himself. This is seen in the contrast there was, from the first, between the effect of the feudal tenure under which the lands of Lower Canada were held, and that of the soil of Massachusetts, as prescribed in her charter. One was a vassal, the other the master of his own homestead.

Treating the etymology of the term socage as being what has been popularly received as the true one, a plough, we may perhaps find, as Sullivan intimates in his treatise on Land Titles, the origin of the socalled "Plough Patent," which was granted by the Council of New England in 1630 to John Dy and others in Maine, known as Lygonia, including the lower part of Saco River, and covering the present city of Portland, which was afterwards absorbed into the ever-widening jurisdiction of Massachusetts.

If we follow the legislation of Plymouth and Massachusetts upon the subject of the holding and management of lands, we find it conducted with great shrewdness and discretion, and in entire accordance

with this doctrine of free and common socage. In 1633 the Plymouth Company required deeds of conveyances to be recorded, and made lands descendible, in the language of their statute, "according to the commendable custom of England, and hold of Est Greenwich." The form of their deeds prescribed by the company contained a recital that the lands conveyed thereby were "held of his Majesty as of his manor of East Greenwich in the County of Kent, in free and common socage, and not in capite." The law of Massachusetts for the making and recording deeds bears date in 1652. A law of 1636 divides the intestate lands of a deceased owner between his sons, the eldest taking a double share, but does not give the daughters any part of it, "if there is a son or sons." And in this, so far as I can judge from what is known, they copied directly from the English law prevailing in Kent when the colony came over to Plymouth, such being the law of socage tenure in the time of John, as given in Reeves's History of the English Law. Nor can I find that daughters ever took any share in the father's estate by inheritance, if he left a son or sons, either in Plymouth or Massachusetts, during the existence of the colony charter. This was first provided for by a statute in 1692, which gave the eldest son a double share of the estate, and divided the residue in equal shares among sons and daughters.

In this connection, it seems proper to notice the phraseology and purport of one or two other clauses in our early statutes, which require explanation to understand their purpose and application. It serves to illustrate too with how much jealousy the founders of New England sought to have their estates free of alienation at the will of the owner, and to rid themselves and their lands from every lingering vestige of feudal bondage.

In 1641 Massachusetts in her Body of Liberties declared that "all our lands and heritages shall be free from all fines and licenses upon alienations, and from all heriots, wardships, liveries, primer seisins, year day and waste, escheats and forfeitures upon the death of parents or ancestors, natural, unnatural, casual, judicial, and that forever." It is unnecessary for our purpose to notice any of the obligations due from a vassal to his superior lord as incidents of feudal tenure which are here enumerated and forbidden, except that part of them which is repeated in the Province Statute of 1692, which declares "all lands and heritages within this province shall be free from year day and waste, escheats and forfeitures upon the death of parents or ancestors, natural, casual, or judicial, and that forever, and except in cases of high treason." By thus referring to escheats and forfeitures upon the death of parents or ancestors, the provincial legislature evidently meant to guard against the consequences of the conviction and punishment of death for felony, which worked, among other things, a forfeiture of the felon's estate. And an explanation of the terms here used is found in the history of the mother country. As the common law once stood, if any one holding lands committed treason or felony, the king might seize these lands, no matter who was the lord of the manor under whom they were held, and hold them for a year and a day, and during that

time might make all the profits possible out of them, not only by cultivating, but by wasting and stripping them of their wood, timber, and buildings, and at the end of that time they were delivered up to the lord of the manor. It had been a principle of the feudal law that, if one was guilty of certain offences known as felonies, he thereby forfeited his lands to the crown. And one of the concessions which the barons of England wrung from John in the Magna Charta was an agreement on his part that he would hold the lands of such persons as were convicted of felony ouly for a year and a day, giving up this right of exercising strip and waste over them. We ought to bear in mind, moreover, that lands held by socage tenure were just as liable to forfeiture to the crown for felony as those held by any other tenure. In order, therefore, to guard the lands of the Province from any possible relict of feudal burdens which had come down through the common law, beyond fealty, the legislature expressly declared that the lands of the Province should be free from this ancient liability to "year day and waste," and they went further, and declared them free from escheat or forfeiture upon the death of the ancestor from whom they had descended, from any cause "natural, casual, or judicial," or, in other words, by capital punishment, except in cases of high treason, which was a thing which the provincial legislature had no right to control.

We accordingly find that from that date to this there has been no forfeiture of lands for crime by the common law in this Commonwealth. And it would not be difficult to suppose that we here have the origin and cause of that clause in the Constitution of the United States which declares "no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood or forfeiture, except during the life of the person attainted."

The view which has thus far been taken has assumed that, though the lands of Massachusetts, under both her charters, were as free as the freest in England, and no service was in fact due in their behalf' beyond the universal obligation of fealty on the part of the owner, they never were, at any time prior to the Revolution, allodial in the sense in which that term was used and understood under the Roman or Saxon laws. And here the question naturally arises, How is that now? Is the holding of our lands allodial, independent of any superior? or is it, in theory at least, subject to some superior who holds the relation of lord paramount over it? In England this superior is acknowledged to be the king. And such continued to be the case with our lands here, so long as Massachusetts formed a part of the British empire. Of course, when the State became independent of Great Britain, this feudal obligation to the king ceased. Did it ever revive in favor of any other sovereignty or body of men? There are two theories upon this point: one, that by our independence all our lands became allodial; the other, that the States or the United States, by succession, took the place of the crown in this respect, and that we hold our lands of the United States, or of the State in which they are situated, as our fathers held them of the king. But when we remember that the oath of fealty is altogether distinct and different from that of allegiance, that feudal service was an incident of title or owner

ship of lands, and that the State or the United States never became in any sense the owner of lands belonging to individual proprietors at the Revolution, and never became successors to the crown by the way of purchase or assignment of royal rights and prerogatives, it is difficult to see how, when these lands were released from their feudal obligation to the crown, a similar obligation was imposed upon them, in invitum, in favor of a newly created government, between which and the crown there was no privity or dependence. And I confidently adopt the language of Judge Story, that "for most purposes our lands may be deemed to be perfectly allodial, or held of no superior at all." "The yeomanry are absolute owners of the soil." And the language of Chancellor Kent gives, in a few words, an epitome of the changes through which the tenure of lands in our country has passed, when he says, "Thus by one of those singular revolutions incident to human affairs, allodial estates once universal in Europe, and then almost universally exchanged for feudal tenures, have now, after the lapse of many centuries, regained their primitive estimation in the minds of freemen."

And well may the people of New England congratulate themselves that a love for free, independent ownership of lands, and a power of acquiring and disposing of them at will, was so early and so firmly planted in the habits of thought of the men who settled upon these shores. It has neither prompted an ambition to accumulate large landed estates in a few hands, nor suffered those who tilled the earth to lose their manliness of spirit and become tenants of a soil which they did not own, and has done much to preserve the original traits of New England character; while the once proud yeomanry of England, the small independent proprietors of their own acres, have been changed to mere tenants; while the spirit of aggrandizement by possession of large estates, which may be traced back to the introduction of feudalism at the Conquest, has been spreading and growing stronger, till grave and reflecting men are startled when they contemplate the consequences to the kingdom of this tendency of land monopoly. And, in view of which, a writer in the "Westminster Review" has arrived at the conclusion "that pauperism in England has grown with the growth of large estates;" "that the poorer classes, driven into the large towns, living in hovels and dens and garrets, in darkness, ignorance, and want, constitute a breeding ground for crime and disease." "In a word, the system has benefited neither tenants nor land-owners, • producers or consumers." In view of all which, I can only add, the more we study the character of the fathers of New England and their institutions, the more cause we have to respect and admire the political sagacity in which they were founded.

Dr. Josiah G. Holland of New York, and Judge Manning Ferguson Force of Cincinnati, Ohio, were elected Corresponding Members.

The President called the Society's attention to a bundle of old papers recently noticed in one of the cupboards of the

Library, on the wrapper of which is written, "Returns of Negros"; also, in the hand of Mr. Felt, a former Librarian of the Society, "Printed in 3d vol. 2 series, p. 95 to 97. These papers belong to the Mass. Archives." On which it was unanimously voted to return these papers to the Massachusetts Archives.

DECEMBER MEETING, 1873.

A stated meeting was held on Thursday, December 11, at 11 o'clock A.M.; the President in the chair.

The Recording Secretary read the record of the preceding meeting.

The Librarian read his monthly list of donors to the Library.

The President announced the death of Don Joaquin José da Costa de Macedo, of Lisbon, Portugal, an Honorary Member since 1839; his decease having been announced by Lord Stanhope, at the Annual Meeting of the London Society of Antiquaries, last year.

He also noticed the decease of a Corresponding Member, John Gough Nichols, Esq., of London, and submitted the following account of him, prepared by Mr. Whitmore :

It is with sincere regret that we learn of the death of our Corresponding Member, John Gough Nichols, Esq., F.S.A. His death, which took place on the 13th November, at Holmwood, near Dorking, closes, for the moment at least, a literary history of very considerable extent and interest. Mr. Nichols was the heir and successor, alike in business and in literary pursuits, of his grandfather, John Nichols, Esq., F.S.A., the historian of Leicestershire, and the compiler of "Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century." In fact, properly to appreciate the life and work of our late associate, it is necessary to notice the long-continued connection of his family with the literature of antiquities.

John Nichols, a Londoner of good family, was born in 1745, and was apprenticed to William Bowyer, the first of learned English printers, the friend as well as publisher of the most distinguished literary men of his day. Nichols proved so valuable to his master that, on attaining his majority, he was taken into partnership by Bowyer, and contributed thereafter