The Roman, British, and Teittonic Systems. 49 



times was there the same strange mixture of races with, 

 identical results of village communal government, and, more- 

 over, as the English conquest has hardly affected the Indian 

 rural economy, so also the Roman conquest hardly affected 

 that of Britain. 1 



Though united with Sir Henry Maine in his advocacy of the 

 primitive theory, he will not agree with him in attributing 

 both polities of village and tribe to one ethnic source ; and 

 moreover, like Seebohm, he seeks to sever the village system 

 from the tribal.^ The former, he thinks, is a later development 

 of the latter; and the Iberian, lagging behind in the tribal 

 stage, was transformed into the villager by Aryan conquest. 



Let us now proceed to sum up the various evidences and form 

 therefrom an opinion of our own. And first, we must draw 

 attention to the wide distribution of communal land tenure 

 brought to light by the researches of some half-dozen or more 

 authors. We must note also that no two systems of land tenure 

 thus evolved agree in anything but their most important features. 

 That of the Roman agrimensor could in no way be confused 

 with that of the Teutonic Mark. Nor could either the English 

 village or tribal system described by Seebohm be reconciled 

 to the allodial tenures in Von Maurer's system of German 

 economy. Nor indeed has the settled serfdom under a lord- 

 ship of Seebohm's village much in common with the tribal 

 polity of his "Welsh discoveries. Again, amongst the nations 

 and tribes carrying out a communal system of land tenure, 

 there are often found marked differences in their processes 

 of husbandry. More especially important is it for us to note 

 that the three-field system in the arable land has never been 

 traced back to the districts from which the Angles, Jutes, and 

 Saxons originated. Hanssen has particularly drawn attention 

 to the absence of the fallow division and consequent two-course 

 rotation. There is much the same general relationship, but 

 a marked distinction of details in the various seignorial 

 economies which we have touched upon. 



The tax-collector of Roman Britain, if we may presume that 



^ Gomme, Yill. Commun., p. 60. ^ Id. Ibid, pp. 60, 292. 



E 



