Feudal Relationships and the Law: A Comparative Enquiry

This essay is no more than a preliminary endeavor to examine analogies between principles of land tenure in the recent history of an East African society and what appear to be strikingly similar principles that obtained in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England. If these analogies are demonstrable with a reasonable degree of plausibility, a useful framework of reference may be established within which some broader theoretical issues can be discussed. One such issue is that, given a degree of structural similarity between two or more social systems, there might be a corresponding equivalence in the logic of legal thought in response to a common object of litigation—in this particular case, the subject of land tenure.