40 English and Continental Backgrounds
tain point, for, while he remained king, he was king over
1 every foot of soil in his country, and, as such, there was
I something which he could not give away.
Two questions may now be asked, the answers to which
should show the part played by bookland in the changing
Anglo-Saxon society. Did the grants establish a lasting
relation between grantor and grantee, and, if so, of what
kind? What were the things which the king gave away?
In answer to the first question, it may be said that there
was more of the out and out gift and less of the loan or
conditional grant in these cases than one, having in mind
the relations between the king and his great men at a
later time, might suppose. Usually there was a previous
obligation on the part of the king or the expectation of
future service from the grantee. But there may have
been cases where there was no relation between grantor
and grantee either before or after the transaction, cases
in which the king simply yielded to importunity or was
trying to bring better order into a locality by placing more
power in the hands of one man.
As to the second question, at least two things can be
named that the grantee might receive. One was the
right, when his men were fined in the courts, to take that
part of the fine, the wife, that had before gone to the king.
The other was the duty, in cases where a whole hundred
had been granted, of acting as presiding officer in the
hundred court. When, as was more often the case, only
part of a hundred was granted there was no immediate
placing of bookland holders at the head of courts; but the
taking of the fines that were imposed in the hundred court
seems to have been a long step towards it. Soon many
holders of bookland were presiding over courts in the parts
of hundreds that had fallen to them, the old hundred
court often surviving, in a reduced state, for those men
who were still on folkland. The point reached by this
process at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period varied much
from hundred to hundred. There were probably many
hundreds that remained practically untouched by it. It