wealthy family of Shakespeares, descendants of the illustrious William, receiving a princely revenue as a consequence of the genius of a man who lived many generations ago. Why should not the benefits of a patent accrue to the patentee, his heirs and assignees forever, as well as those derived from the ownership of a valuable piece of land or of mining property or of a railroad right of way? If the effect of inherited bias could be obliterated, as of course it cannot, if we could look at this matter with an unprejudiced eye, the similarity between these various kinds of privilege would be recognized, and the various incomes derived therefrom would be classified in one group.

The man who develops a mine or who takes up new farm land stands in a similar position to that occupied by the inventor or the author. He performs a valuable service to society, which service is accompanied by more or less risk of pecuniary loss, and which, if extraordinary gains are to be received, ordinarily requires a high degree of energy, foresight, and personal initiative. The world needs the services of men possessed of these qualities; they should be well rewarded. If successful, if they have chosen the right mines or farms, if they have developed these in such a manner that the mines or the farms produce good or unusually large outputs, extraordinary rewards should accrue to these individuals, temporarily at least. But after the mine or the farm has reached a firm business basis, after the experimental stage is passed, the pressing need for the payment of extraordinary returns by society is removed. A railroad, for example, when first built, involves risks of various kinds. Undoubtedly, the builders of a railroad should for a term of years be well rewarded, exactly as the inventor of some valuable appliance or process should be. But it should be clearly recognized that the extraordinary returns which may for a term of

years be considered as a payment for risk must finally be transmuted into market opportunity rent. The recognition of this modification in the nature of such returns is as important to the student of the monopoly problem or of tax reform as it is to the theoretical economist.

If the analysis herein presented is adequate, a sharp line of demarcation may be drawn between interest and "market opportunity rent," or rent. The concept of rent as applied to a return received from land is narrowed to include only that portion of the total return which is due to situation in respect to a market, or, in other words, to that which is due to land considered as an area upon which to carry on industrial operations or to perform services which are demanded by society. On the other hand, the concept is broadened so as to include all returns which are due to special privileges,-to market opportunities of all kinds. Land rent in its restricted sense is only one form of "rent." Rent is an income received because of the existence of some economic privilege or desirable market opportunity which is not susceptible of depreciation in the sense of physical wear and tear.

FRANK T. CARLTON.

ALBION COLLEGE.

AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE CONTINUITY OF

THE OPENFIELD SYSTEM.

THE arrangements of openfield or champion farming are not easily realized and understood by persons accustomed to the compact plots and fenced-in fields of the English estates of the present day. How are we to conceive that people holding land in hereditary tenure and protected in their ownership against outsiders had to submit to all sorts of regulations and restrictions in disposing of their land? How is it that property the title to which was recognized to be private by the courts depended in its economic use not so much on the owners as on a union of neighbors? What was the juridical nature of that union and from what sources did it derive its powers? By what machinery were its decrees formulated and enforced? These and other puzzling questions present themselves to the student of rural antiquities, and his perplexity is not likely to be lessened by the consideration that the system in question obtained not only in certain regions of England, but over the greater part of Europe, that it arose in the early Middle Ages and lasted in many places up to the nineteenth century, that it was not merely a method of managing tillage and pasturage, but an arrangement of property connected with the distribution of land in equal or proportionate holdings.

Our information about the working of the system comes from different sources, and its parts overlap to a certain extent. There are traces on the soil itself, still visible in the shape and names of the fields and in the agrarian. maps of the time before the inclosures. There are stray

references in ancient Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman documents. There are fines and regulations entered on court-rolls dating from the fourteenth and later centuries. It is evident that there is a unity and continuity of purpose and practice between these various groups of evidence, but the persons who were responsible for their existence did not take care to explain to us in what manner they have to fit, how the original roots of the institutions in question are to be connected with their later offshoots. One thing is clear; namely, that it would amount to a kind of scholarly self-annihilation to reconstruct the openfield arrangement of each period purely and solely on the strength of the evidence belonging to this period. It is surely not unreasonable to illustrate the use of Saxon headlands and temporary fences by Middle English and even modern practices. It would, of course, be dangerous to assume identity in every detail. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that there was identity at bottom in the working of institutions characterized by the same peculiar terms and the same artificial practices. I wish on the present occasion to give an account of the rural by-laws of the Oxfordshire manor of Great Tew, a place popularly known as the residence of Lord Falkland in the reign of Charles I. Three court-rolls of this manor have been courteously communicated to me by Mr. A. Ballard. They are of the years 1756, 1759, and 1761, but the arrangements described in them are very archaic and tally well with much earlier information.

1. Before studying these court-rolls, let us glance at some passages from Domesday Book and from the Hundred Rolls of Edward I. bearing on the manor in question. The Domesday survey does not make a definite distinction between the various Tews mentioned by it,' but Great Tew must have corresponded to the principal

1 Domesday, i. 155 d, 156 d.

manor of the name entered in the fief of Odo of Bayeux.1 It was in William the Conqueror's reign a large estate with a considerable home farm, containing six ploughteams and tenants' land tilled by sixteen teams. The estate was rated at sixteen hides, and there was land in it sufficient for twenty-six ploughs—that is, approximately 3,120 acres of fair arable land. It is noteworthy that the assessment corresponds exactly to the number of actual teams belonging to the tenants. The cultivation fell short of what it might have been by four ploughlands, there being only twenty-two teams on an area where there was land for twenty-six ploughs. The rural population consisted of thirty-one villain and eight bordarii households, besides fourteen serfs. As we may assume that these last were working on the home farm, there remain the thirty-one villains as the chief shareholders of the sixteen dependent teamlands, about one villain per half-team,-an equation which is rendered still more exact by the presence of the eight bordarii, small tenants who must have shared the remaining half-teamland between them, getting on the average seven and a half acres each (on the scale of 120 acres per teamland).

In the Hundred Rolls of Edward I., Great Tew appears under its distinctive name. Three owners have shares in it. John de Perwes (Preaux?) holds two-thirds from the Earl of Arundel. Another estate belongs to the four daughters of Roger of Somery, as tenants of the same fief of Arundel. A third portion had been carved out for Baldwin de Ver, and was held of him by his brother John and some assigns (assignati). In the Testa de Nevill, a scutage roll of the close of Henry III.'s reign, were

1 Ibid., i. 155 d: Idem episcopus tenet Tewam. Ibi sunt xvi hidae. Terra est xxvi carucis. Nunc in dominio vi carucae, et xiv servi, et xxxi villani cum viii bordariis habent xvi carucas. Ibi ccc acrae prati xii minus et ci acrae pasturae T. R. E. et post valuit xx libras. Modo xl libras. Alnod Chentisc tenuit.

2 Rot. Hundr., ii. 845