Evidence from an entirely different quarter supported the main conclusion. Far back at the beginning of the eighth century Bede had spoken of the hide as the normal holding of the English householder. By a train of very subtle and elaborate calculations Maitland came to the conclusion that the hide of which Bede spoke and to which Domesday testifies contained 120 arable acres,--a tenement too large for any serf or semi-servile _colonus_ and therefore precluding the idea that the manorial system was dominant in England in very early Saxon times. How then did the system arise? Maitland advanced an ingenious hypothesis, admitting, "that nothing which could be called a strict proof could be offered"--that the word _manerium_ as used by the Domesday commissioners possessed a technical sense. Domesday was a fiscal inquest; the object of the commissioners was the collection of geld; geld is collected from persons who live in houses and the word _manerium_ means a house. For the fiscal purpose of these Norman officials _manerium_ meant "the house at which geld is charged." The lord, in other words, was made responsible to the state for the payment of geld from his demesne land and the land of his villeins, and was bound to take measures to see that the tax was paid by such freemen and socmen as might be attached to his manor. The theory was not of course intended to provide a solution for the main problem. It suggested an answer to the question "What is the technical meaning attached to the word _manerium_ in Domesday?" it revealed one of the possible forces which may have contributed to manorial dependence: but it did not explain or pretend to explain either the forces which made for the subjection of the peasantry to seignorial justice or the peculiar system of ownership and cultivation which was distinctive of the manor.
The problem was no doubt mainly economic, but it possessed its legal aspect. A brilliant analysis of Anglo-Saxon _diplomata_, which could hardly have been accomplished save by a practised lawyer, revealed the fact that the Anglo-Saxon kings had been freely alienating public powers, fiscal and jurisdictional, to churches and private persons. The Saxon land-book does not transfer land, but superiorities over land. It may be true that the gift has all the appearance of being unconditional, "granted as a reward for past services, not as a condition for the performance of future services"; but the contrast between the deeds of the Saxon and Norman period is one rather of form than of substance. Every Saxon grant of "immunities" reserves the "trinoda necessitas," that fundamental military obligation which lay upon every freeman, and if that service was not performed the land was forfeit to the king. Then again land-loans were not uncommon, and land-loans and land-gifts shaded imperceptibly into one another. All the lineaments of the feudal land system are already visible in the later Anglo-Saxon period. The feudal formula of dependent tenure is known; the exercise of jurisdictional rights by private persons is a familiar fact; in places one could even see, "a four-storied feudal edifice." No large historical transformation is matter for unqualified regret. Feudalism was a necessary stage in the education and development of the barbarian world. "There are indeed historians who have not yet abandoned the habit of speaking of feudalism as though it were a disease of the body politic. Now the word feudalism is and always will be an inexact term, and, no doubt, at various times and places there emerge phenomena which may with great propriety be called feudal, and which come of evil and make for evil. But if we use the term, and often we do, in a very wide sense, then feudalism will appear to us as a natural and even a necessary stage in our history. If we use the term in this wide sense, then (the barbarian conquests being given to us as an unalterable fact) feudalism means civilisation, the separation of employment, a division of labour, the possibility of national defence, the possibility of art, science, literature and learned leisure; the cathedral, the scriptorium, the library are as truly the work of feudalism as is the baronial castle."