ing of demesne land and land occupied mainly by villani holding virgates or yardlands. The boundaries of the territory of a manor are easily and generally given in the Saxon charters, but the yardlands cannot be described by boundaries because they are bundles of strips scattered over the common lands of the manor. Therefore in the Manor Rolls they are generally and sufficiently described as the virgate of so and so, without any other addition.
The two main points which M. de Coulanges discovers to be widely prevalent in Merovingian Gaul as described in the texts are:—
1. The country is divided into estates or villæ.
2. The estates are divided into demesne land and the mansi of the tenants.
Further, he finds the villa or estate to be an indivisible unit. When it becomes for instance subject, according to Roman law and custom, to division among heirs, he finds that each heir takes a portio, but this portio is not a slice or division of the villa or estate, all in a ring fence and with its separate boundaries. It is sometimes an undivided portio—a joint interest in the revenues of the estate—or in other cases it is a certain number of the mansi of the estate, described as the mansi of such and such coloni. Thus Vigilius, who made his will in A.D. 670, possessed five entire villæ, and portions in twenty-seven others, and yet each villa was an indivisible unit.[1]
So if the owner of a villa wished to make a sale of part of his villa, he could sell an isolated vineyard or a field of his demesne land, but by far the most usual subject of a transfer was so many mansi.
The grants to the abbeys were of the same character, sometimes of whole villæ, sometimes of so many mansi in a villa. So the abbeys obtained scattered estates such as we find in the Polyptiques of the ninth century.
M. de Coulanges writes:—
'The domain or the villa was divided for the purposes of culture into "manses" of tenants and this permanently, in such a way that the proprietor was all but obliged in making any transfers to respect this division. It was difficult to sell an isolated field, it was easy to sell the various pieces of land which a serf occupied.'[2]
Turning to the mansus itself he writes:—
'It is clear that the manse hardly ever formed a compact whole. The vineland was seldom close by the arable. It is even doubtful whether the arable of each mansus was in one single holding.'[3]
