HKB
[The precarium.]
Foreign historians have shown how after the barbarian invasions one single form of legal thought, or (if we may borrow a term from them), one single legal 'institute' which had been saved out of the ruins of Roman jurisprudence, was made to do the hard duty of expressing the most miscellaneous facts, was made to meet a vast multitude of cases in which, while one man is the owner of land, another man is occupying and enjoying it by the owner's permission. This institute was the precarium. Originally but a tenancy at will, it was elaborated into different shapes which, when their elaboration had been completed, had little in common. For some reason or another one begs (rogare) of a landowner leave to occupy a piece of land; for some reason or another the prayer is granted, the grantor making a display of generosity and speaking of his act as a 'benefit' (beneficium), an act of good-nature and liberality. An elastic form is thus established. The petitioner may, or may not, promise to pay a rent to his benefactor; the benefactor may, or may not, engage that the relationship shall continue for a fixed term of years, or for the life of the petitioner or for several lives. Usually this relationship between petitioner and benefactor is complicated with the bond of patronage: the former has commended himself to the latter, has come within his power, his protection, his trust (trustis), has become his fidelis, his homo. At a later time the inferior is a vassus, the superior is his senior, for the word vassus, which has meant a menial servant, spreads upwards. Then the precarium, as it were, divides itself into various channels. One of its streams encompasses the large province of humble tenancies, wherein the peasants obtain land from the churches and other owners on more or less arduous conditions, or reserve a right to occupy so long as they live the lands that they have given to the saints. Another stream sweeps onward into the domain of grand history and public law. The noble obtains a spacious territory, perhaps a county, from the king by way of 'benefaction'; the precarium becomes the beneficium, the beneficium becomes the feudum[1046]. The king can not prevent the beneficia, the feuda, from becoming hereditary.
[The English land-loan.]