The Roman, British, and TeiUonic Systems. 53 



herdmaster was not only the most lucrative but tlie most 

 pleasant and facile. Then, as man became circumscribed and 

 limited in his choice of pasturage, by the growing claims of his 

 neighbour, the ground needed artificial treatment, in order 

 that it should support the lives of himself and his live stock. 

 For a time it paid him best to exhaust the soil of its fertility, 

 and then pass on to fresh ground. But even then the nomadic 

 habit would be lessened ; until a wholly stationary existence was 

 necessitated by the expensive processes which were required 

 in re-fertilising exhausted mould. The heavy cost of the farm- 

 ing stock introduced a system of co-aration ; blood-relationship 

 determined the limits of this primitive form of co-operation, 

 and these two circumstances combined would originate the 

 idea of communal land tenure. 



Applying these principles to the nations in question, we may 

 conclude that the Roman influence had predisposed the British 

 in a degree, more or less according to their accessibility or the 

 reverse, to the ideas associated with overlordship. 



When antiquarians bring to light traces of old hearth re- 

 ligion, tribal houses, communal land tenure, terrace cultivation, 

 and the like, they should be treated as evidences of a more 

 prolonged survival in certain inaccessible parts of England of 

 the tribal stage of man's development. 



This island at the period of the Anglo-Saxon invasion was 

 peopled by various nationalities. Some, like the Alemanni, 

 may have been half Teutonised already;^ others, like the Belgse, 

 had long been in commercial touch with highly civilised 

 nations : parts of the country were completely Romanised ; 

 and there were districts in which the Celtic population was 

 still unadulterated. When, then, the Anglo-Saxons brought 

 over a more or less advanced system of the Teutonic Mark, 

 they would find parts of the country, like Wales, behind even 

 Cffisar's brief description of German civilisation ; but thej^ 

 would find other parts to which their ideas of land tenure 

 would be utter barbarism. 



The Frisians migrated to these shores, as Bishop Stubbs - 



' Seebohm, Eng. Vlll. Conimun., p. 285. 

 ^ Stubbs, Constit. Hist., ch. iv., p. 70. 



