They paid a kind of hereditary respect to the Lords
of Ravenswood; but, in the difficulties of the family, most of the
inhabitants of Wolf's Hope had contrived to get feu-rights to their
little possessions, their huts, kail-yards, and rights of commonty, so
that they were emancipated from the chains of feudal dependence,
and free from the various exactions with which, under every possible
pretext, or without any pretext at all, the Scottish landlords of the
period, themselves in great poverty, were wont to harass their still
poorer tenants at will. They might be, on the whole, termed independent,
a circumstance peculiarly galling to Caleb, who had been wont to
exercise over them the same sweeping authority in levying contributions
which was exercised in former times in England, when "the royal
purveyors, sallying forth from under the Gothic portcullis to purchase
provisions with power and prerogative, instead of money, brought home
the plunder of an hundred markets, and all that could be seized from
a flying and hiding country, and deposited their spoil in an hundred
caverns.
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