A system of land tenure based on absolute ownership rather than feudal obligations; a legal and economic doctrine favoring freehold property.
Formed from 'alodial' plus '-ism' (a suffix creating names for systems, ideologies, or doctrines), reflecting 19th-century scholarly attempts to name medieval property systems.
Medieval legal scholars invented '-ism' words like 'alodialism' and 'feudalism' to describe competing systems—they were basically creating a vocabulary to understand property rights that seemed confusingly different!
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