Agricultural Statistics 



fallow of a 2 or 3 course shift is of course impossible ; the 

 Roman writer perhaps did not intend a remark so entirely 

 definite, tho' it must be allowed he pourtrays the husband- 

 men as very little patient of labor, further than the neces- 

 sities of the times render expedient. The absence of land- 

 ownership is well explained in Tacitus, and it seems per- 

 spicuous enough that a division of the earth's products could 

 be more suitably arranged towards hay time and harvest : it 

 does not seem to follow that the partition, when made, was 

 necessarily in proportion to the number of the actual tillers 

 of the soil in autumn and winter from each free household, 

 as the warlike occasions of the gentes would disturb such an 

 arrangement, and the princeps and his comites (who seem to 

 foreshadow the feudal system) might be generally allotted a 

 return out of proportion to the contributions to the labor of 

 husbandry made from their households, in addition to the 

 voluntary tribute already cited. To bring into the sketch 

 the mediaeval system of agriculture as to rotations and 

 ownership, the text of Tacitus scarcely permits ; any sort of 

 settled property in the arable nullifies the word mox^ as the 

 writer would scarcely expect the critics of his day to believe 

 in divisions of property whose descent, tho' not successive, 

 was already defined by alternation. These tribes include 

 the Angli (40), who may have been the ancestors of the race Angli and 

 of the same name, who afterwards settled in England ; those Suem - 

 of Tacitus belonged to the Suevi, and appear to have been 

 one of the freer communities : English and Scandinavian 

 traditions unite in representing the later Angli as deriving 

 from what in historic times was Denmark, rather than Ger- 

 many, but both countries are of course included in Germania 

 ( i st cent. ) . The exact ancestors of the modern Scandinavians* 



* Fomponius Mela (c. 45) names the island [always so till the 6th Early 

 century, at least, and of unknown magnitude] of Scandinavia, as yet notices of 

 held by the Teutoni : Fliny, the naturalist (c. 79), says part of it, Scandi- 

 containing 500 pagi, was held by the Hillevioni, noting also the islands navia. 

 of Scandia, Ditmna, Bergos and Nerigo, from which (latter) the voyage 

 to Thule is wont to be made : Solimis Polyhistor (c. 80] mentions 

 Scandinavia, as the largest of the islands of (Jermania: Tacitus (c. 98) 

 places the Suiones [this term recurs in Eginhard (c. 820) as applicable 

 to Swedes and Norwegians, and in Adam of Bremen (c. 7077), who 



