January 31, 1890.] 



SCIENCE. 



71 



things which in most places has passed away. What I have to 

 deal with now, as far as Mr. Seebohm is concerned, is to be 

 found in one or two passages in his book, in which, as I have 

 hinted, he lets fall, in a perfectly casual way, doctrines which 

 go far to upset all that has hitherto been held as to the early 

 history of the English folk. 



Now, a wholly new teaching on such a matter as the 

 beginning of our national life in our present land is surely a 

 matter of some importance. If it is true, it is a great discovery, 

 entitled to be set forth as a great discovery, with the proudest 

 possible flourish of trumpets. Tlie new teaching should surely 

 be set forth in the fullest and clearest shape, with the fullest 

 statement of the evidence on which it rests. But with Mr. 

 Seebohm the new doctrine drops out quite suddenly and 

 incidentally, as a point of detail which does not very much 

 matter. The belief as to their own origin which the English 

 of Britain have held ever since there had been Englishmen in 

 Britain seems to Mr. Seebohm not to agree with his doctrines 

 about culture and tenures of land. It is by no means clear 

 that there is any real contradiction between the two, but Mr. 

 Seebohm thinks that there is. He is so convinced of the 

 cei'tainty of his own theory, that the great facts of the world's 

 history must give way if they cannot be reconciled with it. 

 The strange thing is, that Mr. Seebohm does not seem the least 

 proud of bis great discovery: he hardly seems to feel that he 

 has made any discovery. He is less excited about a propo- 

 sition which makes a complete revolution in English history 

 than some are when they think that they have corrected a 

 date by half an hour, or have proved some one's statement of a 

 distance to be wrong by a furlong. All turns on the "one- 

 field system" and the "three-field system." The three-field 

 system existed in England, it existed in certain parts of Ger- 

 many ; but it did not exist in those parts of Germany which 

 were inhabited by Angles and Saxons. Therefore, if Britain 

 had any Teutonic settlers at all, they must have come from 

 some other part and not from the land of the Angles and Saxons. 

 Only, to judge from Mr. Seebohm' s tone, the question whence 

 they came, or whether they came from anywhere, is a question 

 hardly worth thinking about, compared with matters so much 

 more weighty as the system of "one-field" or of "three." 



Our first foreshadowing of what is coming is found at p. 372 

 of Mr. Seebohm's book: "Now, possibly this one-field system, 

 with its marling and peat-manure, may have been the system 

 described by Pliny as prevalent in Belgic Britain and Gaul 

 before the Roman conquest, but certainly it is not the system 

 prevalent in England under Saxon rule. And yet this district 

 where the one-field system is prevalent in Germany is precisely 

 the district from which, according to the common theory, the 

 Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain came. It is precisely the 

 district of Germany where the three-field system is conspicu- 

 ously absent. So that although Nasse and Waitz somewhat 

 hastily suggested that the Saxons had introduced the three-field 

 system into England, Hanssen, asmming that the invaders of 

 England came from the north confidently denies that this was 

 possible. 'The Anglo-Saxons and the Frisians and Low Ger- 

 mans and Jutes who came with them to England cannot (he 

 writes) have brought the three-field system with them into 

 England, because they did not themselves use it at home in 

 North-west Geermany and Jutland.'' He adds that even in 

 later times the three-field system has never been able to obtain 

 a firm footing in these coast districts." 



It is wonderful indeed to find the origin of the English people 

 thus dealt with as a small accident of questions about marling 

 and peat manure. Hanssen confidently denies that the Angles 

 and Saxons could have brought the tlu-ee-field system into 

 Britain fi-om their old home; and, if it be true that the three- 

 field system was never known in their older home, he assuredly 

 does right confidently to deny it ; only why should so much be 

 made to turn on the different modes of culture followed 



1 The text of Hanssen, Agrarhistorische Abhandlangen, i. 4i)6, stands thus: 

 ** AUein die Angelsachsen und die welche mit ihnen nach England gezogen sein 

 mogen; Friesen. NiedersachseUy Juten. konnen die Dreifelderwirthschaft nicht 

 nach England mitgebracht haben, weil sie in ihrer Heinat selber in nord- 

 westlichen Deutschland und Jutland nicht betrieben batten." 



in the continental and the insular English landV If the 

 one-field system suited the soil of the old Angeln and the 

 old Saxony, while the three-field system better suited the 

 soil of East Anglia or Sussex, surely our Angles and 

 Saxons would have sense enough to follow in each land 

 the system which suited that land. If they found that 

 the kind of husbandry which suited the soil of their old home 

 did not suit the soil of their new home, they would surely 

 invent or adopt some other kind of husbandry which did suit 

 it. But in any case, if the acceptance of a certain doctrine 

 about the "one-field system with its marling and peat-manure" 

 involves nothing short of all that Mr. Seebohm assures us that 

 it does involve, it would surely have been worth while to 

 think about the mailing and the peat-manure a second time by 

 the light of what had hitherto been looked on as the broad fact 

 of the history of England and Europe. These last may be 

 wrong; but they are surely at least worthy of being thought 

 over before they are cast aside. But with Mr. Seebohm the 

 "common theory" — that is, the recorded history of the 

 English people — is not worth a thought: it may go anywhere. 

 ' 'Hanssen assumes that the invaders of England came from the 

 north." That will do for the present: let them come from 

 any land, so that it be not a land that practises ' 'the one-field 

 system with its marling and peat-manure." 



Some way further on (p. 410) Mr. Seebohm has another 

 pasage, in which, seemingly with the same words of Hanssen 

 before him, he throws out, still very casually but not quite so 

 casually as before, an exactly opposite doctrine: "We have 

 already quoted the strong conclusion of Hanssen that the 

 Anglo-Saxon invaders and their Frisian Low German and 

 Jutish companions could not introduce into England a system 

 to which they were not accustomed at home. It must be 

 admitted that the conspicuous absence of the three-field system 

 from the north of Germany does not, however, absolutely 

 dispose of the possibility that the system was imported into 

 England from those districts of middle Germany reaching from 

 Westphalia to Thuringia where the system undoubtedly existed. 

 It is at least possible that the invaders of England may have 

 proceeded from thence rather than, as commonly supposed, from 

 the regions on the north coast. ' ' 



It is hardly worth while to stop to comment at any length 

 on the confusion of thought implied in such phrases as ' 'Anglo- 

 Saxon invaders of England." As there can be no Anglia till 

 there are Angli, they would literally imply that a band of 

 Angles first came into Britain by themselves, that they set up 

 an England therein, and then sent to their hyphened kinsfolk on 

 the mainland to come after them to share, and doubtless to 

 enlarge, that England. But of course what Mr. Seebohm 

 means by "invaders of England" are those who out of part of 

 Britain made an England for certain later people to invade. 

 We have got back to the days of our grandmothers, when 

 our little books told us how Cassar was "resisted by the 

 English people, who were then called the Britons." We have 

 perhaps got back to the days of good old Tillemont, who 

 attributes all that was done on the native side during the 

 Roman occupation of Britain to ' 'les Anglois. ' ' The confusion, 

 however, belongs to the German writer: Mr. Seebohm simply 

 copies him. And in one point, Mr. Seebohm, after some 

 striving with himself, has corrected a still stranger confusion 

 of his guide. In his first edition the Niedersachsen, which 

 Hanssen so oddly couples with Angelsachsen appear in one place 

 as "Low-Germans," in another as "Low-Saxons." In a later 

 revision the "Low-Saxons" have vanished.' But to couple 

 "Low-German" (the whole) with Anglo-Saxons, Frisians, etc. 

 (each of them parts of that whole) is, as a logical division, 

 even stranger than to couple Angelsachsen and Niedersaolisen. 

 This last phrase implies "High-Saxons" somewhere; and it 

 might not be an ill guess that they are the same as the 



(Continued on p. 75.) 



' In Mr. Seebohm's first edition, the word in the second extract was " Low- 

 Saxon;" in the third it is "Low-German," Hanssen's word is Niedersaclisen. 

 If he is thinking of the circle of Niedersachsen in later German geography, it 

 does not at all help him. 



