in the same way the possessions of a Hindoo, however
divisible theoretically, are so rarely distributed in fact, that many
generations constantly succeed each other without a partition taking
place, and thus the Family in India has a perpetual tendency to expand
into the Village Community, under conditions which I shall hereafter
attempt to elucidate. All this points very clearly to the absolutely
equal division of assets among the male children at death as the
practice most usual with society at the period when family-dependency
is in the first stages of disintegration. Here then emerges the
historical difficulty of Primogeniture. The more clearly we perceive
that, when the Feudal institutions were in process of formation, there
was no source in the world whence they could derive their elements but
the Roman law of the provincials on the one hand and the archaic
customs of the barbarians on the other, the more are we perplexed at
first sight by our knowledge that neither Roman nor barbarian was
accustomed to give any preference to the eldest son or his line in the
succession to property.

Primogeniture did not belong to the Customs which the barbarians
practised on their first establishment within the Roman Empire. It is
known to have had its origin in the _benefices_ or beneficiary gifts
of the invading chieftains. These benefices, which were occasionally
conferred by the earlier immigrant kings, but were distributed on a
great scale by Charlemagne, were grants of Roman provincial land to be
holden by the beneficiary on condition of military service. The
_allodial_ proprietors do not seem to have followed their sovereign on
distant or difficult enterprises, and all the grander expeditions of
the Frankish chiefs and of Charlemagne were accomplished with forces
composed of soldiers either personally dependent on the royal house or
compelled to serve it by the tenure of their land. The benefices,
however, were not at first in any sense hereditary. They were held at
the pleasure of the grantor, or at most for the life of the grantee;
but still, from the very outset, no effort seems to have been spared
by the beneficiaries to enlarge the tenure, and to continue their
lands in their family after death. Through the feebleness of
Charlemagne's successors these attempts were universally successful,
and the Benefice gradually transformed itself into the hereditary
Fief. But, though the fiefs were hereditary, they did not necess