Book Description

Excerpt from An Introduction to American Institutional History Written for This Series Mr. Freeman came to America in the fall of 1881, on the joint invitation of the Lowell Institute in Boston and of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. The united influence of these two local institutions, representing the intellectual union of -Northern and Southern cities, was seconded by two other influences of a local character: first, by Mr. Freeman's natural desire to visit his own son, who married in Baltimore and who now lives upon a plantation in Virginia; secondly, by an ardent longing to see with his own eyes a New England Town Meeting, which, in the genealogy of local institutions, is a long-lost child of Old England and a grandchild of the Fatherland. The historian of "The English People in their Three Homes" regards the local institutions of the United States, North and South, as the historic offspring of England and Germany, as truly as his own name, once applied to all freemen of the English Colonies in America, is directly perpetuated by children and grandchildren in the Old Dominion, where he indulged what he pleasantly calls "old fatherly emotions towards the last-born bairn's bairn," and where, true to historical impulses, he began a "Virginia Domesday" in the old forms: "Freeman tenet; Bell tenuit Ante Guerram. Valebat ... dollarios; modo ... Waste fuit." With the grim humor of William the Conqueror, who, when he fell to the earth upon landing at Pevensey, grasped the soil and thus took seizin of England, Mr. Freeman describes his sons territorial conquest upon the shore of the Rapidan, "Potuit ire quo voluit cum ista terra, for the soil of the Old Dominion sticketh to the boots and is carried about hither and thither " This extract from a letter dated Somerleaze, Rapid Ann Depot, Culpeper County, Virginia, December 25th, 1881, needs no better commentary than the following extract from the Inquisitio Eliensis, Domesday, iii, 497 (or Stubb's Select Charters, 86): "Deinde quomodo vocatur man io, quis tenuit earn tempore Regis Eadwardi; quis modo tenet; ... quantum valebat totum simul; et quantum modo; ..." The suggestion of Domesday-forms came to Mr. Freeman not only from the history of Virginia land-tenure, but from Professor William F. Allen's paper on "The English Cottagers of the Middle Ages," a paper which had been sent Mr. Freeman in answer to his query "about a man in Wisconsin, who has written something about villainage - what a long way off to know about such things - how can I get it?" About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.