cotlands formed the basis of village organisation in all the southern shires except Kent and Cornwall from the Norman Conquest onwards until rendered obsolete by the enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We must suppose then that, though radchenistres are hardly alluded to at all in Wessex in the Domesday returns (they appear once in Berkshire and twice in Hampshire), they must none the less have existed there in the days of Knut and Edward, and we must account for the silence of Domesday about them by the hypothesis that the jurors for the West Saxon hundreds in 1055 were not asked to distinguish between the two classes of ceorlas and therefore merged them together under the vaguer title of tunesmen, a term which occasionally appears in Anglo-Saxon documents and which Latin scribes rendered by the word villanus. We cannot, however, postulate more than a general similarity of system on the various estates, whether of Wessex or Mercia: for the leading characteristic of rural organisation in England has ever been that each village has been free to regulate its own farming and develop its own special customs as to tenure and tillage. Provided this fundamental limitation is kept steadily in view, we may fairly take the sketch furnished by the Rectitudines as an approximately valid picture of all the greater estate-units south and west of Watling Street in the days of Knut and Edward; but at the same time we must remember that the writer of the Rectitudines was not attempting a description of the smaller estates of the ordinary thegns. His treatise is clearly restricted to lordly territories, where elaborate differentiation of classes and minute subdivision of services were both natural and feasible. It may well be then that the comparatively heavy rents and services, recorded in the Rectitudines, were by no means characteristics of the ordinary thegn's estate, and that it was only on the larger ecclesiastical estates, where the lords had power to bind men's souls as well as their bodies, that the exploitation of the tenantry had been carried to any extreme lengths.
Enough evidence has now been presented to give a general idea of the economic and seignorial relations existing between the landowning classes and the mass of the cultivators in the first half of the eleventh century. One question however of considerable importance still remains to be considered, and that is, had the landlords as a class judicial authority over their tenants merely as landowners? In other words, could they set up petty courts on their estates, similar to the manorial courts of a later day, and compel their men to try their disputes in them, at any rate in matters of civil justice, provided the cases did not involve persons who were tenants under other lords? The evidence at our disposal is perhaps too fragmentary and too lacking in precision to enable us to say how matters stood in all parts of England; but two things at any rate seem clear. First, there certainly was a very considerable number of lords in Edward's day who were holding their own private courts or hallmoots (halimotes) in competition with the national hundred moots; and secondly, there was
