succession is limited to the male line.[1] The only places in the Midland counties where we can trace old customs of inheritance that give a reversion to females after males are those that were comprised within the Soke of Rothley in Leicestershire,[2] and Leicestershire apparently had some Gothic or Frisian settlers. The Mercian customs generally show a marked difference from the Kentish custom, and that which can be traced in parts of the South-Western counties.
The customs of rustic primogeniture, ultimogeniture, or succession by the youngest, and partible inheritance, all of them with some variations in detail, remain as witnesses before us of the three chief schemes under which the land of England in Anglo-Saxon time passed from the fathers to their successors; and the three systems can be traced to different parts of the Continent from which Angles, Saxons, and Jutes or Goths came. Of these, the partible custom was the widest spread in Germany, and probably in England and Scandinavia; rustic primogeniture in the North of England and Norway; and junior right on many English manors and scattered districts on the Continent, but on the east of the Elbe it prevailed as a custom over great territories.
The general absence of testamentary power among the Germanic tribes was long continued by their descendants who settled in England. It was not until a comparatively recent time that persons who held estates as manorial tenants, known as copyholders, could by their wills bequeath their lands and tenements to whom they wished. By the custom of many manors, however, they could devise their holdings by a process of surrendering them into the hands of the lord in his court. Those manors and boroughs, consequently, whose tenants and burgesses had the absolute right of bequeathing their estates without reference to their lords and their courts possessed a valuable privilege, which had come down from the remote time of the Anglo-Saxon period. This power was ex-
