Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 37
lord, and, in some cases, he might have no such power.
Also the land might come from the lord and be granted to
the man, in which instance the latter's liberty in disposing
of it was probably less. There was less regularity in the
matter than in continental feudalism, in which, as be-
tween lord and vassal, the greater right to the land lay
with the lord, and everybody must hold his land of some
one. In the Anglo-Saxon relation, the ownership of the
land, as far as there was any conception of ownership,
might lie with the man; men held land under their lords,
that is, under their protection and guaranty, rather than
of them. And yet, in the frequent lessening of the man's
freedom to "go with the land" where he chose, we may
see the lord gaining some right in the land, although what
it was may be too vague to express.1
After commendation had become common, the kings
took account of it for a purpose of their own, and this
resulted in some extension of the practice and added some-
thing to its character. As has been shown, a great weak-
ness in Anglo-Saxon local courts was their inability to
make their authority felt; men were not easily gotten to
court or held to the court's decrees. It was a police
problem. In early times, when the solidarity of the kin
was great, it was natural to look to the kin to hold its
members answerable.2 Later, such police responsibility
was in part territorialised, and the hundred was made a
kind of police unit and was required to bring to justice
those who had committed crime within its bounds. But
this solution was inadequate; the state still found it hard
to deal with the criminal who had little or no property.
The later and greater kings, who were striving to keep
the country in order and who saw that greater efficiency
in the local courts would increase their own revenue,
found in the new grouping of men under lords a way to
meet the police difficulty. Let the lords, men of substance
1 See Translations and Reprints (Documents Illustrative oŁ Feudalism),
pp. 3 and 6, for a bit of illustrative source material on Anglo-Saxon com-
mendation.
2 See above, pp. 18, 19, 21, 22, 25.