Book Review

This book deals with landholding in England during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this period the structural organization of the upper echelons of society, with which this study is concerned, was intimately related to the institutions of lordship, vassalage, and the relationship of tenure. Historians of the law tend to be particularly interested in the emergence of the problematic conception of landownership out of this earlier world of landholding. We tend today to conceive of the typical case of ownership, whether it be of land or of something else, as involving a single person owning a single thing—a farm, an automobile, or whatever. In the Anglo-Norman world the typical situation seems to have been one in which a considerable number of people had rights of one kind or another in the same piece of land, with peasants at the bottom and great men at the top. Even if we simplify by cutting out the lower echelons, there will always be at the least a lord and a tenant. It is not easy to impose on this situation our modern paradigm. Who is the owner? The lord, or the tenant? And from an evolutionary point of view how did a conception of ownership of land (whatever that may mean) emerge out of a world in which there were, perhaps, no landowners at all, merely hierarchies of lords and tenants?	1
This sort of question is the more difficult and also the more interesting because the notion of a common law of landownership—one body of national law for all freeholders at least—is supposed to have been a product of procedural innovations in the reign of Henry II. These changes were mainly related to the resolution of disputes over land rights. The end product was the replacement of a world in which a multiplicity of different seignorial courts, themselves an aspect of landholding, was replaced by a unified system of courts administering one body of law. Did this process merely build on pre-existing ideas of entitlement to land rights, or did it somehow entirely change the basic ideas involved? Was it these innovations that generated the very idea of landownership?	2
Investigation of these and related questions has been made the more difficult by three factors. One is that the analytical ideas involved are themselves problematic. The second is that the sources are limited and often opaque—not very much is or can be known, for example, about what went on in seignorial courts. The third is that those who bring a legal training to the subject have a tendency, perhaps, to seek in the sources a uniformity and simplicity that is not really there. They, perhaps, play down the messy and untidy world of landholding as it actually operated in the period between the conquest and the late twelfth century.	3
Hudson organizes his investigation of the sources under three headings: security of tenure, heritability, and alienability. So far as the first is concerned the level of security of tenure reflects the relative power of lord and tenant in relation to the land. What was the relevance of homage to security? In what circumstances was it thought legitimate for the lord to dispossess the tenant, and where did distraint fit into the picture? What understandings were there of a lord's obligation to replace a holding if the tenant lost the original lands? These and related questions are not capable of any precise answer; what emerges is the general conclusion that a tenant enjoyed "considerable security of tenure in his life-time, provided he did not turn against his lord" (59). Hudson then turns to the somewhat controversial matter of the development of the idea that a landholder's rights were heritable, typically by his eldest son. It has been argued by some writers, in particular by the late S. E. Thorne, that heritability of land was a relatively late development, not fully established in Glanvill's time. Hudson argues very plausibly that this is a mistake, though the development of all-embracing and very strict rules on the matter may have been a slower process. Clearly, once a general acceptance of heritability of landholding exists, tenants are gaining power against lords—in some sense the land has become theirs. Hudson then moves on to consider the evolution of the idea that the landholder can transfer his rights to another, either by gift or sale, without the need either for his lord's consent or the consent of family members of potential heirs. A separate chapter deals with the controls over the alienability of church lands, an important issue in view of the very large amount of land held by ecclesiastical institutions of one kind or another. Modern thought treats the idea of alienability as central to the conception of individual ownership.	4
The final chapter discusses the relationship between Henry II's legal reforms and the evolution of the land law. Hudson's general argument here in one way plays down the significance of what happened in his reign. Thus he argues that there was considerable royal intervention in the seignorial world before Henry's reign and that the customary understandings under which landholding operated were not so radically altered as some writers have argued. Life as it was went on much as it had before, and he argues, surely correctly, that Henry II (or his advisors), had no strategic plan. Broadly, he appears to accept the thesis of Joseph Biancalana that Henry's interventions were based on the idea of remedying "default of justice"—that is, he intervened on the basis that the existing mechanisms had not worked as they should. But more common intervention did have the result of generating a more standardized and rule-based system of landholding, and this was the origin of the common law. The process is, of course, intimately related to the origin of a body of professionals—legal experts—whose existence was bound to modify the customary system of the seignorial courts, about which, unhappily, we know so little. This study is an important contribution to the literature.	5
A. W. Brian Simpson University of Michigan Law School

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