The house-lot or family curtilage at first devolved strictly within the limits of the family.  Here again, at least in England, freedom of alienation seems to have grown up by gradually increased latitude in the choice of successors.  If we may trust the order of development to be noticed in the early charters, which it is hard to believe [358] accidental, although the charters are few, royal grants at first permitted an election of heirs among the kindred, and then extended it beyond them.  In a deed of the year 679, the language is, “as it is granted so do you hold it and your posterity.”  One a century later reads, “which let him always possess, and after his death leave to which of his heirs he will.”  Another, “and after him with free power (of choice) leave to the man of his kin to whom he wishes to” (leave it).  A somewhat earlier charter of 736 goes a step further:  “So that as long as he lives he shall have the power of holding and possessing (and) of leaving it to whomsoever he choose, either in his lifetime, or certainly after his death.”  At the beginning of the ninth century the donee has power to leave the property to whomsoever he will, or, in still broader terms, to exchange or grant in his lifetime, and after his death to leave it to whom he chooses,—­or to sell, exchange, and leave to whatsoever heir he chooses. 1 This choice of heirs [359] recalls the quos heredes appellavit of the Salic law just mentioned, and may be compared with the language of a Norman charter of about the year 1190:  “To W. and his heirs, to wit those whom he may constitute his heirs.” 1

A perfect example of a singular succession worked out by the fiction of kinship is to be found in the story of Burnt Njal, an Icelandic saga, which gives us a living picture of a society hardly more advanced than the Salian Franks, as we see them in the Lex Salica.  A lawsuit was to be transferred by the proper plaintiff to another more versed in the laws, and better able to carry it on,—­ in fact, to an attorney.  But a lawsuit was at that time the alternative of a feud, and both were the peculiar affair of the family concerned. 2 Accordingly, when a suit for killing a member of the family was to be handed over to a stranger, the innovation had to be reconciled with the theory that such suit belonged only to the next of kin.  Mord is to take upon himself Thorgeir’s suit against Flosi for killing Helgi, and the form of transfer is described as follows.

“Then Mord took Thorgeir by the hand and named two witnesses to bear witness, ’that Thorgeir Thofir’s son hands me over a suit for manslaughter against Flosi Thord’s son, to plead it for the slaying of Helgi Njal’s son, with all those proofs which have to follow the suit.  Thou handest over to me this suit to plead and to settle, and to enjoy all rights in it, as though I were the rightful next of kin.  Thou handest it over to me by law; and I [360] take it from thee by law.’” Afterwards,