rs. The idea of
absolute dominion without condition and without definite duties could
have occurred to none. Each lord held his estate in feud, and with a
definite arrangement for participating in the administration of justice,
in the deliberative assembly, and in the war bands of his chief, who in
turn owed the same duties to the lord above him. Even the king, who
stood at the apex of this pyramid, was supposed to be merely holding his
power and his territorial domain as representing the nation. At his
coronation he bound himself to observe certain duties as the condition
of his royalty, and he had to proclaim his own acceptance of these
conditions before he could be anointed and crowned as king. Did he break
through his coronation-oath, then the pledge of loyalty made by the
people was considered to be in consequence without any binding force,
and his subjects were released from their obedience. In this way, then,
also private property was not likely to be deemed equivalent to absolute
possession. It was held conditionally, and was not unfrequently
forfeited for offences against the feudal code. It carried with it
burdens which made its holding irksome, especially for all those who
stood at the bottom of the scale, and found that the terms of their
possession were rigorously enforced against them. The death of the
tenant and the inheriting of his effects by his eldest son was made the
occasion for exactions by the superior lord; for to him belonged certain
of the dead man's military accoutrements as pledges, open and manifest,
of the continued supremacy to be exercised over the successor.

Thus the extremely individual ideas as regards the holding of land which
are to-day so prevalent would then have been hardly understood. Every
external authority, the whole trend of public opinion, the teaching of
the Christian Fathers, the example of religious bodies, the inherited
views that had come down to the later legalists from the digests of the
imperial era, the basis of social order, all deflected the scale against
the predominance of any view of land tenure or holding which made it an
absolute and unrestricted possession. Yet at the same time, and for the
same cause, the modern revolt against all individual possession would
have been for the mediaeval theorists equally hard to understand.
Absolute communism, or the idea of a State which under the magic of that
abstract title could interfere with the whole social order, was