A few more musings on Ron (and Rand!) Paul's claim that the Civil Rights Act has made him less free and an oppressed victim of big government because he cannot call the police to remove and arrest for trespass Black people who come to eat at the lunch counter he owns...
Before there were police forces so that you could run to the government to get it to evict trespassers from your land and recover your stolen stuff, there was... seisin: had you actually ploughed the land and reaped the harvest, protected the villages from Irish or Viking raiders, administered justice--or had others done so, or had the jobs been left undone? if you weren't man enough to do the job, it wasn't yours...
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society:
It is very rare, during the whole of the feudal era, for anyone to speak of ownership, either of an estate or of an office, much rarer still--never, perhaps, except in Italy--for a lawsuit to turn on such ownership. What the parties claim is almost invariably 'seisin'.... What then was this famous seisin? It was not exactly possession... [rather] possession made venerable by the lapse of time. Two litigants go to law... that one will succeed who is able to prove that he ploughed the land or administered justice during previous years or, better still, that his ancestors before him did so... [for] 'the memory of men, as long as it extends'. Title-deeds were hardly ever produced save to assist memory, and if they proved that a transfer had taken place it was merely a transfer of seisin...
I can see Ron Paul rightly claiming that it is an infringement on his liberty for the government to poke its nose into what he does with and on the land of which he has been rightly enfeoffed by King Stephen of Blois, and on which he holds seisin and administers the low, the middle, and the high justice after the manner of Earl Richard "Strongbow" of Pembroke.
