INTRODUCTION 5 



comprehensive work.^ Relying largely upon the plans of town- 

 ship fields as they appeared at the time of their enclosure in the 

 nineteenth century, he interpreted and compared the earlier 

 agrarian arrangements of Roman, Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic 

 peoples. Not merely to field systems, however, did he have 

 recourse, but in the types of village settlement and in the forms 

 of dwelling-house adopted by the peoples in question he found 

 additional evidence for determining the movements of the popu- 

 lation of Europe in the early Middle Ages. The task was a vast 

 one and its achievement noteworthy; but the generalizations 

 suffer somewhat from the circumstances that much of the evi- 

 dence is late in date and that such of it as comes from certain 

 countries, notably France, England, and Italy, is inconsiderable. 

 For information regarding English field arrangements Meitzen 

 relied mainly upon the lucid account given in Seebohm's English 

 Village Community.'^ In this cleverly written book the author 

 reproduces a plan of the township of Hitchin, Hertfordshire, 

 made at the time of the enclosure of the open common fields 

 about 1816. It is the type of evidence which Meitzen himself 

 was to use extensively and which, despite its recent date, is 

 always of value. Beginning with a description of the features 

 portrayed in the Hitchin plan, features which constitute the so- 

 called three-field system, Seebohm with the assistance of three or 

 four terriers carries the reader back to Anglo-Saxon days, arguing 

 that the open fields of English villages at that time differed in no 

 essential particular from the Hitchin fields of 18 16. Behind 

 these descriptions runs the thread of an hypothesis which inter- 

 ested the author more than did the presentation of facts; for it is 

 the thesis of the book that the practically unchanging open-field 

 system of an English township had from Roman days served as 

 the protective shell of a community settled in serfdom upon it.^ 



1 Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Westgermanen mid Ostgermanen, der Kelten, 

 Romer, Finnen und Slawen, 3 vols, and atlas, Berlin, 1895. An account of the 

 antecedent literature of the subject is given in vol. i, pp. 19-28. 



2 Frederic Seebohm, The English Village Community examined in its Relations 

 to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of 

 Husbandry, London, 1883. 



' Ibid., 409. 



