to meet, and touch, and more or less
materially modify the law of property. When in the preceding pages I
have spoken of certain ancient legal distinctions and expedients as
having powerfully affected the history of ownership, I must be
understood to mean that the greatest part of their influence has
arisen from the hints and suggestions of improvement infused by them
into the mental atmosphere which was breathed by the fabricators of
equitable systems.

But to describe the influence of Equity on Ownership would be to write
its history down to our own days. I have alluded to it principally
because several esteemed contemporary writers have thought that in the
Roman severance of Equitable from Legal property we have the clue to
that difference in the conception of Ownership, which apparently
distinguishes the law of the middle ages from the law of the Roman
Empire. The leading characteristic of the feudal conception is its
recognition of a double proprietorship, the superior ownership of the
lord of the fief co-existing with the inferior property or estate of
the tenant. Now, this duplication of proprietary right looks, it is
urged, extremely like a generalised form of the Roman distribution of
rights over property into _Quiritarian_ or legal, and (to use a word
of late origin) _Bonitarian_ or equitable. Gaius himself
observes upon the splitting of _dominion_ into two parts as a
singularity of Roman law, and expressly contrasts it with the entire
or allodial ownership to which other nations were accustomed.
Justinian, it is true, re-consolidated dominion into one, but then it
was the partially reformed system of the Western Empire, and not
Justinian's jurisprudence, with which the barbarians were in contact
during so many centuries. While they remained poised on the edge of
the Empire, it may well be that they learned this distinction, which
afterwards bore remarkable fruit. In favour of this theory, it must at
all events be admitted that the element of Roman law in the various
bodies of barbarian custom has been very imperfectly examined. The
erroneous or insufficient theories which have served to explain
Feudalism resemble each other in their tendency to draw off attention
from this particular ingredient in its texture. The older
investigators, who have been mostly followed in this country, attached
an exclusive importance to the circumstances of the turbulent period
during which the Feudal system grew to maturity; an