TJie Mark System. 43 



A history of this kind is not suited for any detailed ex- 

 amination of the ^Tos and cons concerning it. Nor have we 

 either space or inclination to join in the Franco-German 

 word-warfare, over which so much ink has been spilled with 

 such insignificant results. It is, strangely enough, the same 

 doubtful passage already quoted from the Germania of Tacitus, 

 which affords one of the many battle-grounds between Von 

 Maurer and Fustel de Coulanges. Over the apparently simple 

 interpretation of the word agri the German seeks to prove too 

 much and the Frenchman too little. "Agri " may be too freely 

 translated by the former into Common Field ; but unless the 

 latter is prepared to distort its meaning into a number of 

 separate enclosures, cultivated by different individuals but all 

 belonging to some community or chief, the result is a drawn 

 battle. The word, as used by Tacitus in this passage, probably 

 means the undivided arable lands of the Germanic village ; and 

 being undivided, they were, at any rate for part of the year, 

 subject to communal rights. 



Then again, though Fustel de Coulanges ^ takes in detail and 

 attempts to crush the arguments deduced by Von Maurer from 

 expressions in the earlier Teutonic legislation referring to 

 communal land tenure, he does not touch the ocular evidences 

 surviving up to this day of a communal land economy having 

 some time or other existed in Germany. In fact, the French 

 author assails Von Maurer's evidences of the Mark, rather than 

 the system itself. 



There are too many proofs of some primitive tribal economy 

 in modern German agriculture and land tenure for any one to 

 attack the Mark theory as a whole, though successful on- 

 slaughts may from time to time be made on its details. Taking 

 the histories of the Latin authors as an outline, we may easil}^ 

 sketch in the lesser features as described by Von Maurer, only 

 reserving to ourselves the right to object whenever the earlier 

 economy of the Mark is anachronously fitted in to some later 

 but incomplete economy of the Manor. 



Sir Robert Morier ~ has pointed out that the Bauern Ge- 



^ Fustel de Cotilanges, Orig. of Prop, hi Land^ Engl, trans, pp. 3 to To. 

 ^ Sir R. Morier, Syst. of Pruss. Land Tenure (Cobdeu Club Essays). 



