In  the  same  noiseless  way  villein  tenure  loses  its  servile
incidents  and  assumes  the  form  of  copyhold  tenure,  which
tenure  can  by  15  and  16  Vict.  c.  51  be  commuted  into  free-
hold tenure  at  the  instance  of  the  lord  of  the  manor  or  of  the
copyholder.  By  the  statute  12  Car.  II.  c.  24  all  forms  of  free-
hold tenure  were  practically  reduced  to  the  simple  one  of
tenure  by  common  socage.*

It  is  not  in  any  way  our  purpose,  by  calling  attention  to
these  analogies,  to  detract  from  the  merits  of  the  so-called
Stein  Hardenberg  legislation.  Those  merits  are  of  a  trans-
cendent kind,  but  it  is  to  the  accidents  that  accompanied
the  legislation,  to  the  scale  on  which  the  measures  were  framed,
to  the  spirit  in  which  they  were  carried  out,  and  not  to  the
novelty  of  the  legislation,  that  those  merits  belong.t

*  For  all  practical  purposes  tenure  by  common  socage  is  as  good  as  allodial
ownership,  and  therefore  the  statute  of  Charles  II.,  taken  in  combination  with
the  statutes  of  the  present  reign,  enabling  the  transmutation  of  copyhold  into
freehold  tenures,  must  be  considered  as  the  English  equivalent  of  what  we
have  described  as  the  second  main  incident  of  the  Prussian  agrarian  legislation.
For  the  purpose,  however,  of  strict  accuracy,  it  should  be  noted  that  in
England,  and  in  England  alone,  the  feudal  structure  of  society  still  exists  on
the  statute  book,  with  the  further  exceptional  circumstance  that  the  sovereign
is  lord  paramount,  and  therefore,  strictly  speaking,  the  only  real  landowner,
all  his  subjects  being  only  tenants.  Hence  the  inveterate  use  of  the  terms
freehold  tenure,  and  freeholder,  when  the  idea  intended  to  be  conveyed  is  that
of  allodial  ownership.
