, and I will venture to quote from my book
the account of the evolution at Aston of a tenantry from the older
tribal constitution, because in this case we are actually dealing with
a manor, and the evidence is unique so far as England is concerned.

The first point is that the village organisation, the rights of
assembly, the free open-air meetings, and the corporate action
incident to the manor of Aston and Cote, attach themselves to the land
divisions of sixteen hides, because although these hides had grown in
1657 into a considerable tenancy, fortunately as a tenancy they kept
their original unity in full force and so obstinately clung to their
old system of government as to keep up by _representation_ the once
undivided holding of the hide. If the organisation of the hide had
itself disappeared, it still formed the basis of the village
government, the sixteen hides sending up their sixteen _elected_
representatives. How the tenancy grew out of the original sixteen
homesteads may perhaps be conjecturally set forth. In the first place
the owners of the yard-lands succeeded to the place originally
occupied by the owners of the sixteen hides. Instead of the original
sixteen group-owners we have therefore sixty-four individual owners,
each yard-land having remained in possession of an owner. And then at
succeeding stages of this dissolution we find the yard-lands broken up
until, in 1848, "some farmers of Aston have only half or even a
quarter of a yard-land, while some have as many as ten or eleven
yard-lands in their single occupation." Then disintegration proceeded
to the other proprietary rights, which, originally appendant to the
homestead only, became appendant to the person and not to the
residence, and are consequently "bought and sold as separate property,
by which means it results that persons resident at Bampton, or even at
great distance, have rights on Aston and Cote Common." And finally we
lose all trace of the system, as described by Mr. Horde and as
depicted by the representative character of the Sixteens, and in its
place find that "there are some tenants who have rights in the common
field and not in the pasture, and _vice versa_ several occupiers have
the right of pasture who do not possess any portion of arable land in
the common field," so that both yard-lands and hides have now
disappeared, and absolute ownership of land has taken their place. Mr.
Horde's MS. enables us to proceed back from modern t