the same as allodial. The land was in both cases family land, held collectively in the former case, and by one of the family in the latter. This is clearly seen in the manors and tenures of the Isle of Wight, mentioned in Domesday Book, where twenty-one tenures in parage are named and thirty in allodium. Under this odal or udal tenure in Norway at the present time all the kindred of the udalman in possession are what is called odelsbaarn to his land, and have in the order of consanguinity a certain interest in it, called odelsbaarn ret.[1] Hence, if the udalman in possession should sell or alienate his land, the next of kin is entitled to redeem it on repaying the purchase-money, and should he decline to do so, it is in the power of the one next to him to claim his right and recover the property to the family or kindred. The effect of this custom is evidently, to a certain degree, to entail the land upon the kindred of the udalman. It affords us a glimpse of the probable operation of the early Anglo-Saxon mægth, which did not as a collective body of kindred own land, but everyone in the mægth or kindred had obligations to the others in the same mægth, with certain reversionary rights.
From the consideration of the historical evidence relating to the settlers of Hampshire, the survival for centuries of the term Gewissas as their original collective name, and the various customs and tenures which existed in so marked a way at the time of the Domesday Survey, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Goths or Jutes must have had much in common with those afterwards known by the general name of Northmen, and from the evidence of the runes it is certain that there was a close connection between the Goths and Angles on the one hand and the Norse on the other.
The darker-complexioned people among the invaders and colonists of England during the Anglo-Saxon period
- ↑ Laing, Samuel, ‘Journal of a Residence in Norway,’ ed. 1851, p. 137.
