ON LAND TENURE IN ANCIENT TIMES. 167 
countries before the feudalisation of Europe, and, in a form 
necessarily very much modified and blurred, long con- 
tinued. to survive the introduction of manorial rights and 
individual possession. Sir Henry Sumner Maine’s exceed- 
ingly interestmg and able works afford abundant proof of 
this position.* He summarises the researches of G. L. von 
Maurer, who has written on the law of the Mark, or Town- 
ship, which is still found in the more backward parts of 
Germany. The Mark, or Township, was an “organised, 
self-acting group of Teutonic families, exercising a common 
proprietorship over a definite tract of land, its Mark, culti- 
vating its domain on a common system, and sustaining itself 
by the produce. It is described by Tacitus in the Germany 
as the vicus ; it is well known to have been the proprietory 
and even the political unit of the earliest English Society ; 
it is allowed to have existed among the Scandinavian races, 
and it survived to so late a date in the Orkney and Shetland 
Islands as to have attracted the personal notice of Walter 
Scott.”} Nasse of Bonn says that “the Mark is the origin of 
manorial rights and customs.” 
Speaking of the system of these Village-Communities as 
he saw them in India, Sir Henry Sumner Maine says, “their 
unexpected and (if I may speak of the impression on myself) 
their most startling coincidence with the writers who have 
recently applied themselves to the study of early Teutonic 
agricultural customs, gives them a wholly new value and 
importance. It would seem that light is pouring from many 
quarters at once on some of the darkest passages in the 
history of law and of society. To those who knew how 
strong a presumption already existed that individual property 
came into existence after a slow process of change, by which 
it disengaged itself from collective holdings by families or 
larger assemblages, the evidence of a primitive village 
system in the Teutonic and Scandinavian countries had very 
great interest; this interest largely increased when England, 
long supposed to have had since the Norman Conquest an 
exceptional system of property in land, was shown to exhibit 
* Village-Communities in the East and West. Murray, 1871. His other 
works which bear on this subject are all of deep interest and value, namely, 
Ancient Law, Murray, 1861 ; Lectures on the Early History of Institu- 
tions, Murray, 1875, and Dissertations on Early Law and Custom, Murray 
1883. The author, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, K.CS.I., LL.D., F.R.S., 
was formerly Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Member of the India 
Council, Reader on Jurisprudence and the Civil Law in the Middle 
Temple, and Regius Professor of the Civil Law in the University of 
Cambridge. 
+ Village-Communities in the East and West, p. 10. 
