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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.