The Ro7nan, British, and Teutonic Systems. 55 



economy, but peaceful in tlieir instincts when once they had 

 satiated their land hunger and were left alone. Though too 

 ignorant to be practical traders, they were commercial in their 

 tastes, valuing every transaction of life, even life itself, at so 

 many thrimsas. 



Unlike the Roman citizen, the Saxon invader shunned or 

 destroyed the municipia, and absorbed himself into the isolated 

 existence of rural domesticity.^ 



The possession of land was the basis of all his distinctions of 

 rank. The boast of "Civis Romanus sum " had become obso- 

 lete and meaningless. If we may use the word citizen in its 

 modern English sense, viz. an inhabitant of the town as 

 opposed to one of the country, there was nothing like it in 

 the new economy. Eorl and ceorl were its Saxon substitutes, 

 and the citizen became the political and social inferior of the 

 squire and yeoman for centuries after, until the repeal of the 

 corn laws announced to the nation that he had resumed that 

 old social status which he had possessed in the Roman muni- 

 cipia. 



We cannot expect to find the system pursued by the con- 

 querors under the peculiar circumstances of an invasion which 

 was piecemeal and incoherent, identical with (we might almost 

 say recognisable as) either that pursued at home or that in 

 vogue in the conquered country. 



In the Teutonic character there was an independence and 

 individualism which afterwards found a vent under allodial 

 customs as soon as the Frank settled in Transalpine Gaul. 

 Again it was this same disregard of a central authority, this 

 innate love for tribal subdivision, which brought about isola- 

 tion and want of cohesion in face of a common enemy, and 



1 It must not be supposed that the ancient British were altogether 

 exterminated even in the early times of the Conquest. The Domesday 

 record shows that the servi do not appear at all in the Eastern and 

 Midland shires, but gradually increase towards the west and south-west. 

 Mr. Ashley, in his Economic History, ch. i., p. 17, deduces from this, that 

 the Anglo-Saxons, in the later days of the Conquest, began to enslave 

 rather than exterminate their foes ; and Camden points out that the 

 ancient British gradually retired to spots inaccessible by climate or 

 position, such as the north or west of the coxmtry. 



