This evidence is of decisive importance in regard to the forma tion of unified holdings; we are on entirely free soil, with no vestige whatever of manorial organization or of coercion of tenants by the lord. The Hufe, the normal holding, is preserved intact in order to secure agricultural efficiency. This "Anerben" system is widely spread all through Germany. The question whether the eldest or the youngest succeeds is a subordinate one. Anyhow, manorial authority is not necessary to produce the limitation of the rights of succession to land and the creation of the system of holdings, although this has been often asserted, and one of the arguments for a servile origin of village communities turns on a supposed incompatibility between the unified succession and the equal rights of free coheirs.
We need not speak at any length about other parts of Germany, as space does not permit of a description of the innumerable combinations of communal and individual elements in German law, but we must point out some facts from the range of Scandi navian customs. In the mountainous districts of Norway we notice the same tendency towards the unification of holdings as in the plains and hills of Schleswig and Holstein. The bonder of Gudbrandsdalen and Telemarken, the free peasantry tilling the soil and pasturing herds on the slopes of the hills from the days of Harold Harfagr to our own times, sit in Odalgaards, or free hold estates, from which supernumerary heirs are removed on receiving some indemnity, and which are protected from aliena tion into strange hands by the privilege of pre-emption exercised by relatives of the seller. Equally suggestive are some facts on the Danish side of the straits, viz., the arrangements of the bills which correspond to the hides and virgates of England and to the Hufen of Germany. Here again we have to do with normal holdings independent of the number of coheirs, but dependent on the requirements of agriculture—on the plough and oxen, on certain constant relations between the arable of an estate and its out lying commons, meadows and woods. The 1361 does not stand by itself like the Norwegian gaard, but is fitted into a very close union with neighbouring Ms of the same kind. Practices of coaration, of open-field intermixture, of compulsory rotation of lot-meadows, of stinting the commons, arise of themselves in the villages of Denmark and Sweden.
We catch a glimpse, to begin with, of a method of dividing fields which was considered archaic even in those early times, the so-called "forniskift" and "hamarskift." The two principal features of this method are the irregularity of the resulting shapes of plots and the temporary character of their occupation. The first observation may be substantiated by a description like that of Laasby in Jutland : "These lands are to that extent scattered and intermixed by the joint owners that it cannot be said for certain what (or how much) they are." Swedish documents, on
the other hand, speak expressly of practices of shifting arable and meadows periodically, sometimes year by year.
Now the uncertainty of these practices based on occupation be came in process of time a most inconvenient feature of the situa tion and evidently led to constant wrangling as to rights and boundaries. The description of Laasby which I have just quoted ends with the significant remark : "They should be compelled to make allotment by the cord." This making of allotments by the cord is the process of rebning, from reb, the surveyor's cord, and the juridical procedure necessary for it was called "solskift"— because it was a division following the course of the sun.
The two fundamental positions from which this form of allot ment proceeds are: (I) that the whole area of the village is com mon land (faellesjord), which has to be lotted out to the single householders; (2) that the partition should result in the creation of equal holdings of normal size (1361s). In some cases we can actually recognize the effect of these allotments by ancient solskift in the i8th century, at a time when the Danish enclosure acts produced a second general revolution in land tenure.
The 12 oldest inhabitants, elected as sworn arbitrators for ef fecting the allotment, begin their work by throwing together into one mass all the grounds owned by the members of the commu nity, including dwellings and farm-buildings, with the exception of some privileged plots. There is a close correspondence between the sites of houses and the shares in the field. The first oper ation of the surveyors consists in marking out a village green for the night-rest and pasture of the cattle employed in the tillage (fortd), and assigning sites to the houses of the coparceners with orchards appendant to them (tofts) ; every householder getting exactly as much as his neighbour. From the tofts they proceed to the fields on the customary notion that the toft is the mother of the field. The fields are disposed into furlongs and shots, as they were called in England, and divided among the members of the village with the strictest possible equality. This is effected by assigning to every householder a strip in every one of the furlongs constituting the arable of the village. Meadows were often treated as lot-meadows in the same way as in England. After such a "solskift" the peasants held their tenements in undis turbed ownership, but the eminent demesne of the village was recognized and a revision of the allotment was possible.