THE STATUS OF PEASANTRY IN PORTLAND. 75 



1, and the strips in the field were all cultivated in common. 

 The tariff of compositions was all fixed in cows. 



The aboriginal Iberian population appears to have remained 

 settled on the land as serfs, but not as slaves ; i.e., they held the 

 lowest place in the social organisation, but were not subordinated 

 to the free, being merely subjected into tributaries as regarded 

 their clans and chief, and compelled to serve as hatchet men 

 only in the erection of camps, unlike the Celtic free, who had 

 their military obligations graduated according to personal status. 



It will thus be seen that germs of the later manorial system 

 were contained in the comparatively simpler Celtic arrange- 

 ments, germs which would account for the system taking strong 

 and speedy root in those places where the Celtic element made 

 up a considerable portion of the population, and will easily 

 elucidate reasons why in an isolated part this system should for 

 long defy the changing hand of time, being disguised only by a 

 thin veil of modernism. 



It is now generally conceded that the power of Rome was 

 never so great in the west, and that the Roman occupation of 

 Britain partook more of a military than of a civil character, in 

 spite of many isolated cases of Roman villa remains and traces of 

 Roman culture. There is ample evidence to prove that the 

 Celtic land system stubbornly held its own, though opposed to 

 the Roman city, and that the Celtic people, as a rule, merely 

 came to the town (or port ?) for legal or commercial purposes, 

 and that Celtic customs and institutions were never uprooted in 

 the south-west of Britain. One great proof of this is, that the 

 emigrants from Britain to Brittany during Saxon incursions, were 

 so strongly Celtic as to stamp out the Latin of Brittany and 

 supplant it by their own dialects, which constitute certain 

 peculiarities of Breton speech and dialect even to-day. 



The Old English social and land systems present many 

 contradictory evidences, easily explainable when we consider 

 the diversities of the tribes who amalgamated eventually with 

 the older inhabitants of Britain. The number of petty kingdoms 



