property. But our Federal and State constitutions guard it expressly.

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