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16 Jurid. Rev. 189 (1904)
Udal Law and the Foreshore

handle is hein.journals/jure16 and id is 195 raw text is: UDAL LAW AND THE FORESHORE. HE dual land tenure in the Orkneys and Zetland, the Norse udal system on the one hand, and the Scottish feudal system on the other, has been the source of much confusion and contention in the intricate and troubled history of these islands. (a) A primitive odal not charged with any particular services must, as Freeman says, have seemed something strange and unintelligible to the Normans coming into England. (b) Just so was it to Sir Walter Scott when he visited Zetland in the year 1814. He has painted for romance(c) the portrait of Magnus Troill, the stark Zetland Udaller and Norse chauvinist, but the great novelist, albeit Scottish lawyer and antiquary, was puzzled by the entanglement of land-rights in Zetland. To his legal eye and feudal outlook, the dualism of tenure and the resultant contradictions were eccentricities. (d) The litterateur of feudal romance could no more rest in allodial individualism, than the Roman lawyers could conceive of an unlimited series of successive estates, in the same area of land, going back to (a) See Vigfusson, turlunga Saga, L Prolegomena, ccviii. (b) History of the Norman Conquest, Vol. v. p. 369. (c) The Pirate, see especially chap. i. (d) I cannot get a distinct account of the nature of the land rights. The Udal proprietors have ceased to exist, yet proper feudal tenures seem ill under- stood. Districts of ground are in many instances understood to belong to town- ships or communities, possessing what may be arable by patches, and what is muir as a commonty, pro indiviso. But then individuals of such a township often take it upon them to grant feus of particular parts of the property thus possessed, pro indiviso. The town of Lerwick is built upon a part of the com- monty of Sound, the proprietors of the houses having feu-rights from different heritors of that township, but why from one rather than another, or how even

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