Bray; in Hertfordshire at Cashiobury and St. Stephens; in Northamptonshire at Middleton Cheney; in Herefordshire at Marden;[1] and in the great manor and hundred of Crondal in Hampshire.[2] close to the border of Surrey.
After the Norman Conquest, as is well known, under the Norman influence and the growth of feudalism, primogeniture overpowered the other customary rights of succession, and became the general law of the country; but before that time there existed, as these surviving instances show, a rustic primogeniture of remote origin, which, like the custom of Normandy, can be traced to Norway itself.
This succession by the eldest daughter in default of sons is a remarkable usage, and may be a survival in an altered form of an archaic rule, by which inheritances passed through the female in preference to the male line. S. Baring-Gould[3] has drawn attention to a custom that prevails in parts of the Black Forest, where land always descends through a female hand. It goes to the eldest daughter, and if there be no daughters, to the sister or the sister’s daughter. The Black Forest is within the parts of Central Europe where descendants of the broad-headed Alpine race may be traced, and if this custom is pre-historic, which is extremely likely, its origin must probably be ascribed to that race. There are, however, in Norway traces of a broad-headed brown race, distinct from the Lapps, the existence of whom has been already mentioned, and they have been described by Ripley as probably of the Alpine stock. It is quite conceivable that this eldest daughter custom in Norway may have been derived from these older Norwegian people and preserved in its present form in parts of that country.
After the Norman Conquest the strict rule of Norman feudal primogeniture was deliberately applied by the
