Such an inquiry must also deal with the converse possibility, namely, the cases in which the manor is so large that several village units fit into it. We may find very frequently in some parts of the country large manors which are composed of several independent villages and hamlets[850]. On large tracts of land these villages would form separate open field groups. Although the economic evidence is not within our reach in early times, we have indications of separate village meetings under the manorial court even from the legal point of view taken by the court-rolls. In several instances the entries printed in the second volume of the Selden Society publications point to the action of townships as distinct from the manorial court, and placed under it. In Broughton a man distrained for default puts himself on the verdict of the whole court and of the township of Hurst, both villains and freemen, that he owes no suit to the court of Broughton, save twice a year and to afforce the court. Be it noted that the court of Hurst is distinguished from the township, which appears subordinated to it, probably because there were other townships in the manor of Hurst. At the same time the township is called upon to act as an independent unit in the matter. Even so in the rolls of Hemingford, the township which forms the centre of the manor and gives its name to it, is sometimes singled out from the rest of the court as an organised corporation[851]. When township and tithing coincided, as in the case of Brightwaltham, the tithing gets opposed to the general court in the same way[852]. Altogether the corporate unity of townships is well perceivable behind the feudal covering of the manor. Mr. Maitland says with perfect right, 'the manor was not a unit in the governmental system; the county was such a unit, so was the hundred. So again was the vill, for the township had many police duties to perform; it was an amerciable, punishable unit; not so the manor, unless it coincided with the vill[853].' And then he proceeds to suggest that the true explanation of the manor is that it represents an estate which could be and was administered as a single economic and agrarian whole. I am unable to follow him entirely as to this last point, because it seems pretty clear that the open field arrangements followed the division into townships, and not those into manors. From the point of view of the services, of the concentration of duties of the tenantry in regard to the lord, the manor was a whole, and for this very reason it was a whole as regards geldability, but this is only one side of the economic structure of society, the upper side, if one may be allowed to say so. The arrangement of actual cultivation is the other side, and it is represented by the township with its communal open fields. Now in a great many cases the estate and the community fitted into each other; and of these instances there is no need to speak any further. But if both did not fit, the agrarian unity is the township and not the manor. The open field system appears in this connexion as outside the manor, and proceeding from the rural community by itself.