1 8 Roman Britain and Early England 



beer as much as their fondness for bread made them give atten- 

 tion to corn-growing. But the old opposition to a settled life 

 always came up. The noble youths despised work. If their own 

 tribe was not fighting, they joined themselves to one that was at 

 war. ' They would rather challenge an enemy ', says Tacitus, 

 ' and earn the honour of wounds than plough the soil and wait 

 for the season to bring its return. They think it dull and stupid 

 to get by the sweat of their toil what they can win by their 

 blood.' Besides wounds they brought home booty of all kinds to 

 show the extent of their victories. A restless spirit was moving 

 in these men which was destined to make them conquerors of 

 several lands. The men of greatest prowess in war were made 

 nobles and chiefs or kings, and war also led to an increase in the 

 number of slaves, but at the time agriculture was beginning to 

 take firm hold of these wild tribes and forcing them to give it 

 serious attention there were few nobles and not many slaves, 

 and the majority of the tribesmen were freemen of equal rank. 



These things explain the open fields, the strip-holdings, and 

 the common cultivation which seem so strange and foolish to us. 

 In the midst of perpetual war men had to live in tribes for safety, 

 and being practically all free and of equal rank they insisted on an 

 equality of treatment in every enterprise. Caesar got at this 

 fact in his talk with the German chiefs. When he asked why 

 they refused to become farmers, they gave several reasons, some 

 of which have already been mentioned. ' They were afraid ', he 

 adds, ' the love of money would grow, and from this would spring 

 divisions and quarrels. They wished to keep the people contented 

 and therefore quiet, and this would be done when each man saw 

 his property made equal to that of the most powerful.' 



The advance of agriculture was met by this protest of the 

 tribal freemen against the division and holding of land as private 

 property ; and the strip-holding system, so difficult to work, 

 was the only plan they could think of to carry out their ideas. 



