Thus, property is the very earliest legal concept expressed in statutes, just as it is perhaps the earliest notion that gets into a child’s mind.  And ownership of land preceded personal property—­for the perfectly simple reason that there was very little personal property until comparatively late in civilization, and for the other more significant reason that an Anglo-Saxon freeman didn’t bother with law when he had his good right hand.  In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, when we were barbarous tribes, a man’s personal property consisted chiefly in his spear, his weapons, or his clothes; enemies were not very apt to take them, and if they did, he was prepared to defend them.  Then, cattle, in those days, belonged to the tribe and not to the individual.  So, I should fancy, of ships—­that is, galleys, not private “coracles,” the earliest British boats.  Consequently there wasn’t any need for a law as to personal property.  What little there was could be easily defended.  But with land it was different.  Property in land was recognized both among the English and, of course, with the Normans; and in ways so similar that it was very easy for the Normans to impose the feudal system upon England.  There had been no feudal system before the Norman Conquest; there were then three kinds of land:  the rare and exceptional individual land, owned by one man—­always a freeman, not a villein or slave—­and this was very small in extent, limited to a very few acres around a man’s home.  Most of the land was held in common; the folgland, so-called, which belonged to the tribe; the land on which the cows of the village were pastured.  And finally there was the public, or unappropriated, or waste land.  Most of this last was seized, after the Conquest, by the big feudal lords.  For they came in with their feudal system; and the feudal system recognized no absolute ownership in individuals.  Under it there were also three kinds of land, and much the same as the Saxon, only the names were different:  there was the crown land—­now I am speaking English and not Norman-French—­which belonged to the king and which he probably let out most profitably; there was the manor, or the feudal land, which was owned by the great lords, and was not let by the king directly; and then there was the vacant land, the waste land, which was in a sense unappropriated.  Now all the Norman kings had to do was to bring the feudal system over the Saxon law of land, so that the tribal land remained the only private land—­that which is called “boke land.”  This is land such as all our land is to-day, except land like our Cambridge Common.  With a very few exceptions, all our land is “boke” land—­freehold land.  Then there was the public land; but that very soon was taken by the lords and let out to their inferiors; this was the great bulk of land in England after the Norman Conquest.  Lastly again there was the crown land, out of which the king got his revenue.  As something like this threefold system of land existed before the Conquest, a subtle change to the feudal system was comparatively easy by a mere change of name.