ally owned its lands free from any
control, and was subsequently reduced to a state of subjection and to a
large extent deprived of its ownership, or whether its whole history has
been one of gradual emancipation, the ownership of the waste, or
common, now ascribed by the law to the lord being a remnant of his
ownership of all the lands of the vill. (See MANOR.)

At whatever date the over-lord first appeared, and whatever may have
been the personal relations of the villagers to him from time to time
after his appearance, there can be hardly any doubt that the village
lands, whether arable, meadow or waste, were substantially the property
of the villagers for the purposes of use and enjoyment. They resorted
freely to the common for such purposes as were incident to their system
of agriculture, and regulated its use amongst themselves. The idea that
the common was the "lord's waste," and that he had the power to do what
he liked with it, subject to specific and limited qualifying rights in
others, was, there is little doubt, the creation of the Norman lawyers.

Statutes of Merton and Westminster the Second.

One of the earliest assertions of the lord's proprietary interest in
waste lands is contained in the Statute of Merton, a statute which, it
is well to notice, was passed in one of the first assemblies of the
barons of England, before the commons of the realm were summoned to
parliament. This statute, which became law in the year 1235, provided
"that the great men of England (which had enfeoffed knights and their
freeholders of small tenements in their great manors)" might "make their
profit of their lands, wastes, woods and pastures," if they left
sufficient pasture for the service of the tenements they had granted.
Some fifty years later, another statute, that of Westminster the Second,
supplemented the Statute of Merton by enabling the lord of the soil to
inclose common lands, not only against his own tenants, but against
"neighbours" claiming pasture there. These two pieces of legislation
undoubtedly mark the growth of the doctrine which converted the
over-lord's territorial sway into property of the modern kind, and a
corresponding loosening of the hold of the rural townships on the wastes
of their neighbourhood. To what extent the two acts were used, it is
very difficult to say. We know, from later controversies, that they made
no very great change in the system on which the country was cultivated,
a system