Bookland (law)

It had been intended as a permanent grant of land for landowners building religious establishments, with the stipulation that the holder must perform road and bridge upkeep and supply men for the fyrd.

[4] The desirability of possessing unencumbered "bookland" in preference to "folkland" must have been immediately apparent to the laity, as Bede complained in a letter to Archbishop Ecgbert of York in 731, regarding the vast tracts of land acquired by "pretended monks" whose licentious interests were anything but Christian.

As Anglo-Saxon law evolved, the religious requirement atrophied and was finally discarded, so that bookland resembled full ownership in the modern sense, in that the owner could grant it in his lifetime, in the same manner as he had received it, by bōc or book, and also dispose of it by will.

[6] The Domesday Book of 1086 does not mention folkland or bookland, but the form of tenure in January 1066 TRE is frequently given, although a variety of wording is used.

This accounts for the tautological definition: it represents an effort to be accurate while sidestepping any and all ongoing disputes regarding ancient Anglo-Saxon law and custom.

Ignoring any prior conjectures, the idea that folkland was land owned by the entire folk was introduced by John Allen in his 1830 Inquiry into the Rise and Growth of the Royal Prerogative in England.

In a short article in The English Historical Review of 1893, Paul Vinogradoff asserted that folkland referred to land governed by folklaw or custom.

Some, such as Frederic Maitland, gave partial or cautious support,[11] while others rejected the assertion and offered their own definitions.

A more recent text dealing explicitly with these controversies is Eric John's 1960 work, Land Tenure in Early England.

[12] He emphatically denies the previously held view that bookland evolved to take the land out of the family line, and in fact developed specifically to keep it within the family, claiming that the king's power over folkland remained too powerful and that his favour depended too much on a subject's good behaviour towards him.

As there are only three explicit references to folkland in surviving documents, few plausible definitions can be ruled out, so long as they satisfy the criterion of historical consistency.