products into his barns. Each
plot of ground, each house, every head of cattle pays a quit-claim;
children may inherit from their parents only on condition of remaining
with them; if absent at the time of their decease he is the inheritor."
This is what was styled in the language of the day an estate "with
excellent dues."--Elsewhere the seignior inherits from collaterals,
brothers or nephews, if they were not in community with the defunct
at the moment of his death, which community is only valid through his
consent. In the Jura and the Nivernais, he may pursue fugitive serfs,
and demand, at their death, not only the property left by them on
his domain, but, again, the pittance acquired by them elsewhere. At
Saint-Claude he acquires this right over any person that passes a year
and a day in a house belonging to the seigniory. As to ownership of the
soil we see still more clearly that he once had entire possession of it.
In the district subject to his jurisdiction the public domain remains
his private domain; roads, streets and open squares form a part of it;
he has the right to plant trees in them and to take trees up. In many
provinces, through a pasturage rent, he obliges the inhabitants to pay
for permits to pasture their cattle in the fields after the crop, and
in the open common lands, (les terres vaines et vagues). Unnavigable
streams belong to him, as well as islets and accumulations formed in
them and the fish that are found in them. He has the right of the chase
over the whole extent of his jurisdiction, this or that commoner being
sometimes compelled to throw open to him his park enclosed by walls.

One more trait serves to complete the picture. This head of the State, a
proprietor of man and of the soil, was once a resident cultivator on his
own small farm amidst others of the same class, and, by this title, he
reserved to himself certain working privileges which he always retained.
Such is the right of banvin, still widely diffused, consisting of the
privilege of selling his own wine, to the exclusion of all others,
during thirty or forty days after gathering the crop. Such is, in
Touraine, the right of preage, which is the right to send his horses,
cows and oxen "to browse under guard in his subjects' meadows." Such
is, finally, the monopoly of the great dove-cot, from which thousands
of pigeons issue to feed at all times and seasons and on all grounds,
without any one daring to kill or take them. Through a