RESULTS AND CONJECTURES 415 



Southeastern England with its divergent field systems was 

 widely separated from the counties in which Celtic influence was 

 manifested. Since the great midland area stretched between, 

 there would seem to be Uttle a priori probability that irregularities 

 in southeastern fields were of Celtic origin. It is of course possible 

 to argue that all English field systems arose on the basis of runrig, 

 as did the Celtic. On this hypothesis the two- and three-field 

 arrangements of the midlands would be such adaptations of run- 

 rig as have been suggested above relative to Northumberland,^ 

 and the systems of the south and east would be other manifesta- 

 tions of it. Such a theory, however, ignores the fact that the 

 midland system was that of the Germans in their home land and 

 was thus more than any other essentially Teutonic. Or are we to 

 assume that the Germans, both in Germany and in England, had 

 a genius for developing runrig into a more regular system ? At 

 all events, the hypothesis would encounter a further difficulty in 

 the fact that the peculiarities of the fields of southeastern England 

 were not all Celtic in type. Settlements and fields here were not 

 small, as they were on the western border, and certain of the 

 earhest units which are met with in the southeast had no corre- 

 spondents at all in the west. 



The Kentish system is at once most divergent and most com- 

 prehensible. The best-defined feature of it is the iugum, the 

 unit of villein tenure, which, compact and rectangular in shape, 

 had its exact counterpart nowhere else in England. If we ask 

 whether the continent offered analogies, we are at once reminded 

 of Roman measurements of land. The application of these, as 

 Meitzen has shown,^ resulted in a superficial unit of the sort 

 actually found in fourteenth-century Kent. This similarity is 

 of the highest importance; for, despite the centuries that have 

 to be bridged, we are led to the inference that the Kentish field 

 system was of Roman origin. While the Anglo-Saxons who 

 occupied the midlands and the south estabhshed there the ele- 

 ments of a two- and three-field system, the Germans who occupied 

 Kent seem to have adopted Roman arrangements and to have 



^ Cf. above, p. 225. 



^ Siedelung und Agrarwesen, i. 276-321, and Anlage 29. 



