may be right. But if there be a beast which
breaks hedges and goes in everywhere, and he who owns it will not or
cannot restrain it, let him who finds it in his field take it and slay
it, and let the owner take its skin and flesh and forfeit the rest.'

England was not given over to one particular type of settlement,
although villages were more common than hamlets in the greater part of
the country.[12] The vill or village answers to the modern civil
parish, and the term may be applied to both the true or 'nucleated'
village of clustered houses and the village of scattered hamlets, each
of a few houses, existing chiefly on the Celtic fringe. The population
of some of the villages at the time of the Norman Conquest was
numerous, 100 households or 500 people; but the average townships
contained from 10 to 20 households.[13] There was also the single
farm, such as that at Eardisley in Herefordshire, described in
Domesday, lying in the middle of a forest, perhaps, as in other
similar cases, a pioneer settlement of some one more adventurous than
his fellows.[14]

* * * * *

Such was the early village community in England, a community of free
landholders. But a change began early to come over it.[15] The king
would grant to a church all the rights he had in the village,
reserving only the _trinoda necessitas_, these rights including the
feorm or farm, or provender rent which the king derived from the
land--of cattle, sheep, swine, ale, honey, &c.--which he collected by
visiting his villages, thus literally eating his rents. The churchmen
did not continue these visits, they remained in their monasteries, and
had the feorm brought them regularly; they had an overseer in the
village to see to this, and so they tightened their hold on the
village. Then the smaller people, the peasants, make gifts to the
Church. They give their land, but they also want to keep it, for it is
their livelihood; so they surrender the land and take it back as a
lifelong loan. Probably on the death of the donor his heirs are
suffered to hold the land. Then labour services are substituted for
the old provender rents, and thus the Church acquires a demesne, and
thus the foundations of the manorial system, still to be traced all
over the country, were laid. Thegns, the predecessors of the Norman
barons, become the recipients of grants from the churches and from
kings, and householders 'commend' themselves and their land t