Indians; when an Indian gets one hundred and sixty acres given to him in severalty he becomes, under the Dawes Act, a citizen of the United States.  Later there grew up emancipation by the guilds.  The word guild meant the members of a certain handicraft, but that was rather the secondary meaning; it originally meant the freemen of the town.  But the freemen of the towns were made up of the freemen of the guilds.  No one could become a member of the guild without going through certain ceremonies, much as he would now to join a trades-union; and no one could become a freeman of the town unless he was a freeman of the guild.  The law grew to be, however, that if a man succeeded in staying in a town for a year and a day, without being turned out, plying his handicraft, he became by that mere fact a freeman of the town; for the citizens of towns established their liberty, both personal and political, far earlier than the dwellers on agricultural land.

    959-975-EDGAR.

CAP. 1. “Secular Ordinance.  Now this is the secular ordinance which I will that it be held.  This, then, is first what I will:  that every man be worthy of folk-right, as well poor as rich; and that righteous dooms be judged to him; and let there be such remission in the ‘bot’ as may be becoming before God and tolerable before the world.”

    1016.  CANUTE.

CAP. 71.  “And if any one depart this life intestate, be it through his neglect, be it through sudden death; then let not the lord draw more from his property than his lawful heriot.  And according to his direction, let the property be distributed very justly to the wife and children and relations, to every one according to the degree that belongs to him.”

CAP. 81.  “And I will that every man be entitled to his hunting in wood and in field, on his own possession.  And let every one forego my hunting:  take notice where I will have it untrespaesed on under penalty of the full ‘wite.’”

But even the great code of Edward the Confessor has, for the most part, to do only with political divisions, what shall be a shire, what a parish, etc., and certain technical matters that have now grown obsolete.  So we may conclude with the statement, substantially accurate, that there was practically no new legislation, no constructive legislation under the Saxons; their social law was all unwritten.

And Parliament did not begin by being a law-making body.  Its legislative functions were not very active, as they were confined to declaring what the law was; more important were its executive and judicial functions.  In modern English government, particularly in our own, one of the basic principles is that of the three departments, executive, legislative, and judicial; the Norman or Roman theory rather reposed all power in one; that is, in the sovereign, commonly, of course, the king, the others being theoretically