Land was better protected when held of a powerful chieftain than when held in one's own right; and hence the practice of commendation, by which free allodial proprietors were transformed into the tenants of a lord, became fashionable and was gradually extended to all kinds of estates.

By marriage or inheritance he might accumulate in his family not only the old allodial estates which, especially on German soil, still continued to subsist, but the traditions and local loyalties which were connected with the possession of them.

It was not the change from allodial to feudal so much as from confusion to order.

The heriot was the payment of a debt from the dead man to his lord; his son succeeded him by allodial right.

There was some resemblance to it in parts of the Saxon organization; but under that organization there was so much of freedom in the allodial or free tenure of land that a great deal of other freedom went with it.

Better was it that they should till the lands of allodial proprietors in misery and sorrow, attacked and pillaged, than to wander like savages in forests and morasses in quest of a precarious support, or in great predatory bands, as they did in the fourth and fifth centuries, when they ravaged the provinces of the falling Empire.

This was the period of what writers call allodial tenure, in distinction from feudal.

His lands may have passed into the hands of the Gothic conquerors; but the Gothic or Burgundian or Frankish possessor of innumerable acres, once tilled by peaceful citizens, remained an allodial proprietor.

An old allodial right makes it possible to redeem at an appraised value a farm that has been sold.

During this precarious state of the supreme power, a difference would immediately be experienced between those portions of territory which were subjected to the feudal tenures, and those which were possessed by an allodial or free title.

Every one, therefore, hastened to seek that protection which he found so necessary; and each allodial proprietor, resigning his possessions into the hands of the king, or of some nobleman respected for power or valour, received them back with the condition of feudal services

The very material existence of this class of former landowners is depending on that indemnification, to defray their debts, (which they formerly had the habit wantonly to contract,) and to provide for the cultivation of their own large allodial property, which they formerly cultivated by the hands of their leaseholders, but now have to invest capital into.

The petty chiefs and allodial lords who everywhere grasped local sovereignty held each other in check.

It is an American doctrine, for in England where the king remained in theory the feudal over-lord, it was not necessary for him or the sovereign Parliament, wishing to take or control land, and having no constitution protecting property rights against such action, to invent any new doctrine; but with us all land is allodial.

Laissez faire school (see Individualism) Land system of tenure before the conquest; allodial in United States; subject to eminent domain.