When we go back beyond the Conquest we fmd strong evidence of the prevalence in the eastern districts of Britain of these village communities in serfdom under manorial lords, though the points of similarity are at first disguised by the difference of language. There seems, however, little doubt that, whatever may have happened at the time of the Saxon invasion and in the dark period which followed after the departure of the Romans, as soon as the Saxons were settled they developed (or adapted) the essential economic features of the manor (compare the Laws of Ine quoted by Mr. Seebohm, p. 142). It is at this point that the principal controversy arises. The older view generally associated with the name of Von Maurer was that the Saxons imported into this island the fully-developed MARK SYSTEM. The members of the mark were freemen, and in their assemblies decided on points of interest to the community. The arable land was divided, and the portions of meadow were allotted by popular vote. According to this view the village community in historical Saxon times had degenerated from this original type, the overlordship of a single individual having taken the place of the free assembly of equals. Against this view, however, Mr. seebohm has made out a very strong case. His principal points are that the Saxons in their own homes do not appear to have cultivated laud on the THREE-FIELD SYSTEM ; that as soon as historical evidence is available we find the closest analogies between the agricultural systems in SaxonEngland and that in the Romano-Teutonic portion of southern Germany ; that there is no sufficient time allowed for the full development independently of the manorial from the mark system, and that there is no reason to suppose that the Saxons exterminated the inhabitants and treated the land as if it were virgin forest. The conclusion is that to a great extent the Saxons simply adopted the system which they found already established by the Romans during their four centuries of occupation. This opinion is supported by the close analogy between the conditions of tenure of the Romano-British colones and the later villani (Seebohm, p. 267). Thus the Roman villa is made to contribute some of the most important elements of the late English village. But now the question arises :—Whence were the elements of the Roman system in Britain derived ? Did the Romans themselves import their own agricultural customs and impose them upon the inhabitants, or did they adapt what they found to their own uses? It is known from other sources that the most usual course of the Romans in their policy of parcere subjectis was to amalgamate as far as possible foreign customs with their own. It is known also from historical evidence that before the Roman invasion in many parts of Britain there was a settled system of agriculture, notably in the southeast, and it would be in accordance with their usual practice for the Romans to take what they found as the basis of their own methods of cultivation and extracting revenue from the people. We are thus thrown still further
back, in order to discover the elements of this system which existed in Britain before the Roman invasion, and in the search we discover, following the lines of Mr. Seebohm's investigation, that through the whole period from pre-Roman to modern times there were two parallel systems of rural economy the essential features of which were preserved in spite of the Roman, English, and Norman invasions— namely the village community in the east and the tribal community in the west of the island. Neither system was introduced into Britain during a historical period of more than 2000 years. The village community of the east was connected with a settled system of agriculture ; the equality and uniformity of the holdings were signs of serfdom, and this serfdom again had itself arisen from a lower stage of slavery. The mark with its equal freemen, so far as this part of Britain is concerned, is thus an untenable hypothesis. We have equality and community, it is true, but they are based not on freedom but on organised serfdom. On the other hand the Tribal SYSTEM which prevailed in the west of Britain (especially Scotland and Wales) and also in Ireland was connected with an earlier stage of economic development mainly of a pastoral kind. The tribal community was bound together by the strong ties of bloodrelationship between free tribesmen. This free equality involved an equal division amongst the tribesmen according to various tribal rules, and this custom of sub-division has survived to our own day in the "RUNDALE" or "run-rig " system of the west of Scotland and Ireland. In this brief summary many interesting points have been omitted and many certainly require further investigation. The origin of the size and shape of the long-acre stripe, the original object of the irregular scattering, and the way in which the system became solidified in such an inconvenient form for modern requirements, can only be alluded to. Perhaps the most remarkable general result is that co-operation which we are accustomed to regard as a purely modern product is very ancient, but whether this co-operation arose, unlike most other ancient institutions, purely from rational elements and from motives of economy and convenience, has not yet been the subject of sufficient investigation. Certainly hitherto the principal danger in reconstructing primitive societies has been to import too readily modern ideas and not to allow sufficiently for what we should now call irrational elements.