་ The the community who had done their work ill. reason is that the community as a whole was answerable to its lord. Sometimes, moreover, the village, like the free towns, farmed the dues and paid a fixed lump sum to its lord. It was, then, a juridical person. 1 Finally, the village had its share in local government, police and the royal courts of justice.2 (Thus the English manor, like a French rural domain of the same period, was dependent on a lord; and the lord claimed dues from his tenants and day-work to till the land which he cultivated himself. But the customs to which the exercise of the right of ownership had to defer, the methods of husbandry and pasturage, the importance of the interests of all kinds entrusted to the peasants themselves, showed the singular strength of the English rural community. What was the origin of this manorial organization, of the usages of the open field, of the condition of the freemen and villeins, of this village community which had the rights of a juridical person and formed the primordial unit of local government? The question of the origin of the seignorial and manorial system, which, in the history of the whole of the West, is a subject of controversy, is Obscurity of the question particularly obscure and complex in of origins. England, because England underwent only a partial Romanisation which is imperfectly known, and the exact extent and character of which it is impossible to estimate. The "Romanists" and "Germanists" of the other side of the Channel engage in battles in which analogy and hypothesis are the principal weapons; and the projectiles are not mortal to either of the two armies. The Germanists deny any importance in the develop 1. We adopt on this point the views of Mr. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 322 sqq. 2. Stubbs, Const. Hist., i, pp. 88 sqq., 102, 115, 128, etc. thesis. The Mark. ment of English institutions to the Roman element, as The Germanist indeed also to the Celtic. The earliest of them sought to explain the formation of the rural community and even that of the manor by the Mark theory.1 Several years before the appearance of the famous works of G. L. von Maurer on the Markverfassung in Deutschland, Kemble in his Saxons in England, drew a picture, somewhat vague in outline it is true, of a Saxon England divided into marks, inhabited by communities of free Saxons, associated of their own free will for the cultivation of the soil and exercising collective rights of ownership in the lands of their mark. In this "paradise of yeomen" the free husbandman is judged only in the court of the mark, submits to the customs of the mark alone, acknowledges no other head but the "first markman," hereditary or elected, or the powerful warrior who secures the safety of the mark. This head, however, ends, thanks to his prerogatives and usurpations, by reducing the members of the community to economic dependence. The lands not yet exploited, which should have remained as a reserve fund at the disposal of the people, fall into the hands of the chief men. This capital phenomenon fully explains the formation of the feudal and manorial system.2 The Mark theory has been partially abandoned. Kemble had the merit of raising questions which are still debated at the present day; unfortunately, his structure is a creation of fancy. Maurer, on the contrary, founded his Mark theory on a thorough study of the German village of the Middle Ages. But Fustel de Coulanges has accused him of having "attributed to ancient Germany 1. A summary of this controversy may be found in Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, pp. 16 sqq.; C. M. Andrews, Old English Manor (Baltimore, 1892) Introduction; E. A. Bryan, The Mark in Europe and America (Berlin, 1893), etc. 2. Kemble, Saxons in England, ed. W. de Gray Birch, 1876, vol. i, especially pp. 53 sqq., 176 sqq. usages whose existence can only be verified twelve centuries later," and has partly succeeded in overthrowing the "mark-system." The Germanists can no longer maintain that the mark is "the original basis on which all Teutonic societies are founded," and even Stubbs, who appears to be unacquainted with the works of Fustel, and quotes those of Maurer with unqualified praise, makes some prudent reservations. He does not admit that ,the mark is a "fundamental constitutional element." But he thinks that the English village "represents the principle of the mark," and in the pages which he devotes to the township and the manor, he allows no place to Roman or Celtic influences. The majority of the best-known English historians of his generation and ours, Henry Sumner Maine, Freeman, Green, Maitland, are, like him, decided Germanists. In the same camp are ranged the German scholars who have studied or approached the problem of the origin of English civilization on any side, such as Konrad Maurer, Nasse, Gneist and Meitzen. The 3 Until 1883, the Romanists had not given uneasiness to the English scholars of the Germanist school. The work of Coote 5 was built in the air, on Romanists. analogies and suppositions which were often extravagant; it is difficult to take seriously his theories on the fiscal survey of the whole of Britain, on the persistence of the Roman Comes and on the Roman origin of the shire. The book in which Fustel de 1. De la marche germanique in Recherches sur quelques problèmes d'histoire, 1885, p. 356. Cf. Le problème des origines de la propriété foncière, in Questions Historiques, ed. Jullian, 1893, p. 21 sqq. 2. Kemble, Saxons, p. 53. 3. Const. Hist., i, pp. 35 sqq., 52 sqq., 89 sqq., 97 sqq. For Stubbs' general views on the Germanic origin of English institutions, see ibid. pp. 2 sqq., 65, 68. 4. Mr. Maitland, however, entirely rejects the term 'mark' as applicable to the English village community. See Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 354-355. 5. The Romans of Britain, 1878. Coulanges had studied Roman Gaul was little known on the other side of the Channel; nor would it have shaken the conviction of scholars who consider that English institutions have had an absolutely original development and are the "purest product of the primitive genius of the Germans." In 1883, the famous work of Mr. F. Seebohm appeared to disturb the tranquillity of the Germanists. Mr. Seebohm set himself to examine "The English Village Community in its relations to the manorial and tribal systems and to the common or open field system of husbandry." Such was the title of the book; the problem to be solved was indicated in the preface thus: "whether the village communities of England were originally free and this liberty degenerated into serfdom, or whether they were at the dawn of history in serfdom under the authority of a lord, and the 'manor' already in existence." The author proceeds from the known to the unknown; his starting point is a description of the remains of open field cultivation which he has himself observed in England. He has no difficulty in proving that this system was already employed at the end of the Middle Ages, and co-existed with the manorial organisation and villeinage. He then goes back to the period of the Norman Conquest. According to him, when the Normans arrived in England, they brought with them no new principle in the management of estates. Already, tempore regis Edwardi, we find the manor, with a lord's demesne and a village community composed of serfs, whom the lord has provided with indivisible holdings; the Domesday Book of the eastern counties speaks indeed of liberi homines and sochemanni, but they were Danes or Normans: the natives were not free tenants. Earlier still, in the time of King Ine or Ini, at the end of the seventh century, the usages of the open field existed, the ham and the tun were manors, the thegn The manor of Roman origin. or hlaford was the lord of a manor, the ceorl was a serf. And as in the laws of Ethelbert a century older, there is mention of hams or tuns belonging to private individuals or to the king, the manor must already have existed at the end of the sixth century. Now, the Anglo-Saxons, at that time, had scarcely completed the conquest of the island; it is impossible, therefore, that the free village community, conforming to the mark system, can have been introduced by them into England, since the first documents that we have on their social condition prove that this free community did not exist. Therefore either the Saxons brought the system of the manor and the servile community into England, or else they found it already established there, and made no change in it. This second hypothesis is and villeinage the more probable ;(the manorial and servile organisation must go back to the period of Roman domination in Britain. It will be objected that the Romans. were few in number, that the Britons were Celts, and that, in the countries where Celtic civilization persisted, Wales and Ireland the manorial organisation did not exist in the Middle Ages. The Celtic tribal community was entirely unacquainted with the fixed and indivisible holding which is one of the essential features of the manor. But, declares Mr. Seebohm, there is nothing to prove that before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the whole of Britain was still under the empire of the customs of pastoral and tribal civilization. The evidence of Cæsar proves that the inhabitants of the south-east had already passed out of this stage. The Romans found subjects accustomed to a settled life. They had no difficulty in establishing in their new province the régime of the 'villa,' the great estate, that is to say, the manor: and the administrative abuses of the Lower Empire hastened the formation of the seignorial authority and the enslavement of the free husbandmen, Germans for the |