Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 39
of the manor would be drawn into its court in matters
touching their economic or property interests. But
private jurisdiction proper, the power of a lord to hold a
general criminal and civil court for freemen and enjoy
its profits, had its origin in grants of bookland. In their
earliest form, these were grants made by the king to some
church, that is, to some bishop or abbot, of certain rights
and privileges over a piece of land and the people on the
land. The grants were evidenced by a written document,
known as the land-book, and their permanence was further
ensured by the anathema of the church.1 Falkland was
land that remained under the folklaw, that is, the
unwritten, customary law—land over which no right, based
upon a written charter or book, had passed.2 The ques-
tion, whether the king, in making his grants of bookland,
bestowed the ownership of the land upon the church, is a
difficult one. Did he give the land to the church and
thus rob of their ownership all the people living on it?
A satisfactory answer cannot be given because, in the
middle ages, there was no sharp distinction between
private ownership and the public authority which the
state has over all its territory. The Latin word dominium,
then in common use, generally implied something of both.
It seems probable, however, that, in the early grants of
bookland, the king did not give away the land, the owner-
ship of which as far as ownership was conceived of, re-
mained where it was already; but he did give away rights
which, according to modern thought, no state could part
with without destroying itself, that is, distinctly public
rights. Yet the king could not carry this beyond a cer-
1 The idea of any kind of land grant by means of writing was undoubt-
edly Roman in origin and came into England through the church, the
first to benefit by such grants. They introduced rights in the land which
were foreign to the old tribal land law. For the text of a land-book of the
tenth century, see Bell's English History Source Books, i., 79-82. See also
Translations and Reprints (Documents Illustrative of Feudalism), pp.
8-10; 13, 14.
2 See Vinogradoff, Falkland, English Historical Review, viii., 1-17. Be-
fore Vinogradoff s work, it had been the accepted view of historians that
folkland was public land, the land owned by the folk as a whole.