Settlement of Country. 27 



had more than a thousand years before Christ begun 

 to overrun the country. These belonged to the Keltic 

 (Celtic) or Gaelic race which had gradually come to 

 occupy partly or wholly, France, Spain, northern 

 Italy, the western part of Germany and the British 

 Islands. They were followed by the Germani (sup- 

 posedly a Celtic word meaning neighbor or brother), 

 also Aryan tribes, who appeared at the Black Sea 

 about 1000 B.C., in Switzerland and Belgium about 

 100 B.C. These were followed by the Slovenes, 

 Slovaks, or Wends, crowding on behind, disputing 

 and taking possession of the lands left free by, or 

 conquered from the Germani. Through these migra- 

 tions, by about 400 A.D., the whole of Western 

 Europe seems to have been fully peopled with these 

 tribes of hunters and herders. The mixture of the 

 different elements of victors and vanquished led to 

 differentiation into three classes of people, economi- 

 cally and politically speaking, namely the free, the 

 unfree (serfs or slaves), and the freedmen an im- 

 portant distinction in the development of property 

 rights. 



1. Development of Property Conditions. 



The German tribes who remained conquerors were 

 composed of the different groups of Franks, Saxons, 

 Thuringians, Bajuvarians, Burgundians, etc., each 

 composed of families aggregated into* communal 

 hordes with an elected Duke {dux, Herzog, Graf, 

 Filrst), organized for war, each in itself a socialistic 

 and economic organization known as Mark, owning 

 a territory in common, the members or Markgenossen 



