Facebook page - Powerful Secrets of Law and Equity Revealed

[Arthur Rubin]

The average peasant or serf was effectively included in the property of the Barons and other nobility.

No effectively about it. Peasants/serfs were bound to the land and were considered chattel to the Lord of the Manor or whoever held it in fief, was possessed of the land.

You mean Parzival (in the initial thread in the Word Salad forum) was partially correct? Serfs were controlled under real property law?

[Gregg]

That Anglosaxon was quite interesting, I found I could read about half of it with a bit of help from my German, although it was harder than original Chaucer it was easier than Beowulf.

Read out loud it sounds like Keith Richards circa 1971 to me.

[notorial dissent]

The problem with that Anglo-Saxon is that you would have been hearing it, NOT reading it. Consider what modern English dialects are like then add it to Anglo-Saxon, and despair.

[Famspear]

I just noticed something else:

[ . . . ] and ealle his eorlas and ealne his þeodscype [ . . . ]

translated:

[ . . . ] and all his earls and all his people [ . . . ]

Assuming that the noun "people" was considered to be singular in "number" back then, as it is today (in American English), it appears from this passage that there was declension of the adjective "all", based on number.

I've studied a teeny tiny bit of the history of English, and in doing so I've considered it odd that in some ways the language became LESS complicated, not more complicated, over the past one thousand years or so, in particular when compared with certain aspects of other Germanic languages.

In modern American English, we can see that the pronunciation of the definite article varies depending on the noun that immediately follows it (roughly pronounced "thee" or "thuh", as in "thee apple" and "thuh man"), but the proper spelling is "t-h-e", regardless of the pronunciation -- but there is no inflection by case, gender, number, tense, person, mood, or voice.

By contrast, from what little German I know, the definite article in modern German can be "der", "dem", "den", "die", or "das" (inflection by case, by gender, and by number).

[grixit]

I read once that the simplification of english grammar began with the Danelaw. Danes and saxons struggling to comprehend each other wore off the corners of their respective inflection systems. Eventually English made its first predatory move and absorbed what was left of Danish. And probably Juttish at the same time.

Thereafter, as a mostly positional and preposition heavy language, it was better equipped than most to incorporate any new words that came its way.

[Tevildo]

You mean Parzival (in the initial thread in the Word Salad forum) was partially correct? Serfs were controlled under real property law?

Yes, basically. English law never recognized full-blown chattel slavery (serfdom), although the English courts would entertain actions from jurisdictions where it did exist. Originally, unfree status went with an unfree tenement, so when a lord obtained a piece of land with an associated unfree tenant (villein), the villein's services went with the land, and the villein was obliged to perform the services for the new lord; the transfer was a transfer of real property, not of personal property in the villein's flesh and blood. Later (in the thirteenth century), the services became detatched from the original tenement, and could be bought and sold independently of land, but they were still treated as real property. The writ de nativo habendo, to reclaim the services of a villein who was employed by someone other than the legitimate lord, was one of the real actions, not a trespass action appropriate to personal property.

Parzival's postings of enormous unedited and un-understood passages from Blackstone may have contained one or two correct statements, purely by accident.

[Siegfried Shrink]

You can eventually paint a wall just by throwing shit at it.