Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV CONFLICTING INTERESTS ON THE WASTE THE difficulties attending the adjustment of the various rights of ownership on ground wholly unused, partially unused, or in the process of undergoing a change of usage, must now engross our attention. The theatre of these was generally those uncultivated tracts which served to separate, socially as well as geographically, one manor from another. Though originally, of course, every yard of soil in this planet was the common property of the human race, portions of it soon came to be regarded as the peculiar property of those sections of the race which first established a title over them by the exercise of some right of ownership. Hence we arrive at the people's proprietary rights to the folcland considered as a whole, and at those of each separate village community to the outer portions of it, whenever such portions happened to be in contact with any area of cultivated soil. Let it be borne prominently in mind that the proprietary rights of the people over the land included nothing beyond the ownership of the ground itself, and that, on the necessity of organised protection arising, all magisterial powers were ceded to the central authority, in whose hands they rested until redistributed by it amongst the seigniorial class. At the period of England's history now under treatment, all such rights, if unappropriated, or undistributed, were vested in the Crown. Many of our constitutional lawyers, especially in mediaeval times, contended that the royal prerogative also included the title to everything over which neither the community nor the individual could exercise the rights of ownership. This important point we may, however, temporarily ignore, confining our attention entirely to the respective interests of lord and people in t... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.