catena/parity/cases/chunkmd/epub-ish.md

## Chapter One

There are no page markers in this text, because the format it was converted
from had none. A chunker that needs pages will produce nothing useful here,
and one that falls back to character position will find the chapter correctly.

The chapter itself concerns the difference between a right and a habit. A
right can be pleaded; a habit can only be described. The men in these records
pleaded habits as though they were rights, and the courts, with a patience
that is easy to underestimate, let them.

## Chapter Two

The second chapter takes the same question into a period where the records are
better. Better records make the problem worse rather than easier, because they
show how much of what looked like custom was in fact a settlement of a dispute
that had gone the other way a generation earlier.

Custom, in this reading, is the name given to the outcome of a quarrel nobody
alive remembers having. It is stable exactly as long as the memory of the
quarrel is dead and the conditions that produced the settlement persist. When
either changes, custom turns out to have been a treaty all along.

## Chapter Three

What remains is to say what this means for the wider argument, which is less
than it might appear. The valley was not typical. It was chosen because its
documents survive, and documents survive where somebody had a reason to keep
them, which is itself a fact about the place.