The English Village Community / Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

I. THE GERMAN TRIBAL SYSTEM, AND ITS TENDENCY TOWARDS THE MANORIAL SYSTEM.

Cæsar's description of the German tribal system.

The description given of the Germans by Cæsar is evidently that of a people in the same tribal stage of economic development as the one with which Irish and Welsh evidence has made us familiar.

'Their whole life is occupied in hunting and warlike enterprise. . . . They do not apply much to agriculture, and their food mostly consists of milk, cheese, and flesh. Nor has anyone a fixed quantity of land or defined individual property, but the magistrates and chiefs assign to tribes and families who herd together, annually, and for one year's occupation, as much land and in such place as they think fit, compelling them the next year to move somewhere else.' [508]

He also alludes to the frailty of their houses,[509] another mark of the tribal system in Wales, which [p337] indeed was a necessary result of the yearly migration to fresh fields and pastures.

Now what were the tribes of Germans with whom Cæsar came most in contact?

The Suevi.

His chief campaigns against the Germans were (1) against the Suevi, who were crossing the Rhine north of the confluence with the Moselle, and (2) against Ariovistus in the territory of the Sequani at the southern bend of the Rhine eastward. And it is remarkable that the Suevi were prominent again among the tribes enlisted in the army of Ariovistus.[510] So that it is easy to see how the Suevi, coming into close contact with Cæsar at both ends, came to be considered by him as the most important of the German peoples.

He describes the Suevi separately, and in terms which show over again that they were still in the early tribal stage[511] in which an annual shifting of holdings was practised. Indeed, their semi-nomadic habits could not be shown better than by the inadvertently mentioned facts that the Suevi who were crossing the Rhine to the north brought their families with them; and that the Suevi and other tribes forming the army of Ariovistus to the south had not had settled homes for fourteen years,[512] but brought their families about with them in waggons wherever they went, the waggons and women of each tribe being placed behind the warriors when they were drawn up by tribes in battle array.[513]

This statement of Cæsar that the Germans of his [p338] time were still in the early tribal stage of economic development in which there was an annual shifting of the households from place to place needs no corroboration or explaining away after what has already been seen going on under the Welsh and Irish tribal systems. The ease with which tribal redistributions were made under the peculiar method of clustering homesteads which prevailed in Wales and Ireland, makes the statement of Cæsar perfectly probable.

But how was it 150 years later, when Tacitus wrote his celebrated description of the Germans of his time?

The 'Germania' of Tacitus.

The 'Germania' was obviously written from a distinctly Roman point of view.

The eye of the writer was struck with those points chiefly in which German and Roman manners differed. The Romans of the well-to-do classes lived in cities. City life was their usual life, and those of them who had villas in the country, whilst sometimes having residences for themselves upon them, as we have seen, cultivated them most often by means of slave-labour under a villicus, but sometimes by coloni.

The scattered settlements of the free tribesmen.

The villages of their servile tenants.

What struck Tacitus in the economy of the Germans (and by Germans he obviously meant the free tribesmen, not their slaves) was that they did not live in cities like the Romans. 'They dwell' (he says) 'apart and scattered, as spring, or plain, or grove attracted their fancy.' [514] Of whom is he speaking? Obviously of free tribesmen or tribal households, not of villagers or village communities, for he [p339] immediately afterwards, in the very next sentence, speaks of the Germans as avoiding even in their villages (vici) what seemed to him to be obviously the best mode of building, viz. in streets with continuous roofs. 'Their villages' (he says) 'they build not in our manner with connected and attached buildings. There is an open space round every one's house.' And this he attributes not to their fancy for one situation or another, as in the first case, but 'either to fear of fire or ignorance of how to build.' [515]

It is obvious, therefore, that the Germans who chose to live scattered about the country sides, as spring, plain or grove attracted them, were not the villagers who had spaces round their houses. We are left to conclude that the first class were the chiefs and free tribesmen, who, now having become settled for a time, were, in a very loose sense, the landowners, while the latter, the villagers, must chiefly have been their servile dependants. And this inference is confirmed when Tacitus comes to the second point and tells us that the servi of the Germans differed greatly from those of the Romans. There were some slaves bought and sold in the market, and free men sometimes sank into slavery as the result of war or gambling ventures; but in a general way (he says) their slaves were not included in the tribesmen's households or employed in household service, but each family of slaves had a separate [p340] homestead.[516] They had also separate crops and cattle; for 'the lord (dominus) requires from the slave a certain quantity of corn, cattle, or material for clothing, as in the case of coloni. To this modified extent (Tacitus says) the German servus is a slave. The wife and children of the free tribesman do the household work of his house, not slaves as in the Roman households.'

Clearly, then, the vicus—the village—on the land of the tribesman who was their lord, was inhabited by these servi, who, like Roman coloni, had their own homesteads and cattle and crops, and rendered to their lord part of their produce by way of tribute or food-rent.

The lords—the tribesmen—themselves (as Tacitus elsewhere remarks) preferred fighting and hunting to agriculture, and left the management of the latter to the women and weaker members of the family.[517]

A later tribal stage than Cæsar described.

Division among heirs.

Now, if we could be sure that the tribal homestead was a permanent possession, and that the village of serfs around it had a single tribesman for its lord, the settlement would practically be to all intents and purposes a heim or manor with a village in serfdom upon it. It was evidently in a real sense the tribesman's separate possession, for, after speaking of blood relationships which bind the German tribesman's family and home most strongly together, Tacitus adds, 'Everyone's children are his heirs and successors [p341] without his making a will; and if there be no children, the grades of succession are brothers, paternal uncles, maternal uncles.' [518]

But then this was also the case in Wales and Ireland. There was division among male heirs of the family land. And yet this family land was not a freehold permanent estate so long as a periodical redistribution of the tribe land might shift it over to someone else.

The embryo manor.

The embryo manor of the German tribesman, with its village of serfs upon it, might therefore, if the same practice prevailed, differ in three ways from the later manor. It might become the possession of a tribal household instead of a single lord; and also it possibly might, on a sudden redistribution of the tribal land, fall into the possession of another tribesman or tribal household, though perhaps this is not very likely often to have happened. Finally, it might become subdivided when the time came for the unity of the tribal household to be broken up as it was in Wales after the final redivision among second cousins.

It must be remembered that land in the tribal stages of economic progress was the least stable and the least regarded of possessions. A tribesman's property consisted of his cattle and his serfs. These were his permanent family wealth, and he was rich or poor as he had more or less of them. So long as the tribe land was plentiful, he as the head of a tribal household took his proper share according to tribal rank; and so long as periodical redistributions took place, even when the tribal household finally was [p342] broken up, room would be found for the new tribal households on the tribal land. But when at last the limits of the land became too narrow for the tribe, a portion of the tribesmen would swarm off to seek new homes in a new country. Frequent migrations were, therefore, at once the proofs of pressure of population and the safety-valve of the system.

Fresh settlements.

The emigrating tribesmen in their new home would form themselves into a new sept or tribe, take possession of fresh tracts of unoccupied land, and perhaps, if land were plentiful, wander about for a time from place to place as pasture for their cattle might tempt them. Then at last they would settle: each tribesman would select his site by plain, wood or stream, as it pleased him. He would erect his stake and wattle tribal house, and daub it over with clay[519] to keep out the weather. He would put up his rough outbuildings and fence in his corn and cattle yard. Round this tribal homestead the still rougher homesteads of his serfs, each with its yard around it, would soon form a straggling village, and the likeness to the embryo manor would once more appear.

The celebrated passage of Tacitus describing German agriculture.

Indeed, when we turn to the famous passage in which the German settlements and their internal economy are described, the words used by Tacitus seem in themselves to indicate that he had in his eye precisely this process which the example of the Welsh and Irish tribal systems has helped to make intelligible to us. Tracts of country (agri), he says, are 'taken possession of' (occupantur) by a body of tribesmen (ab universis) who are apparently seeking new [p343] homes; and then the agri are presently divided among them.

This passage, so often and so variously construed and interpreted, is as follows:—

'Agri pro numero cultorum ab universis vicis [or in or per vices][520] occupantur, quos mox inter se secundum dignationem partiuntur: facilitatem partiendi camporum spatia præstant.

'Arva per annos mutant, et superest ager: nec enim cum ubertate et amplitudine soli labore contendunt, ut pomaria conserant et prata separent et hortos rigent: sola terræ seges imperatur.' [521]

It is unfortunate that the first few lines of this passage are made ambiguous by an error in the texts. If the true reading be, as many modern German critics now hold, 'ab universis vicis'—by all the vici together, or by the whole community in vici—there still must remain the doubt whether the word vicus should not be considered rather as the equivalent of the Welsh trev than of the modern village. The Welsh 'trev' was, as we have seen, a subordinate cluster of scattered households. Tacitus himself probably uses the word in this sense in the passage where he describes the choice of the chiefs, or head men (principes) 'qui jura per pagos vicosque reddunt.' [522] The vicus is here evidently a smaller tribal subdivision of the pagus, just as the Welsh trev was of the 'cymwd,' and not necessarily a village in the modern sense.[523] [p344]

Fresh agri taken possession of and divided under tribal rules.

If, on the other hand, the true reading be 'ab universis in,' or 'per, vices' or 'invicem,' the meaning probably is that fresh tracts of land (agri) are one after another taken possession of by the tribal community when it moves to a new district or requires more room as its numbers increase.

The new agri, the passage goes on to say, are soon divided among the tribesmen or the trevs, 'secundum dignationem,' according to the tribal rules, the great extent of the open country and absence of limits making the division easy, just as it was in the instance of Abraham and Lot.

The agriculture is a co-aration of fresh portions of the waste each year.

In any case it is impossible to suppose that Tacitus meant by the words in vices or invicem, if he used them, that there was any annual shifting of the tribe from one locality to another, for it is obvious that the very next words absolutely exclude the possibility of an annual movement such as that described by Cæsar. 'Arva per annos mutant et superest ager.' They change their arva or ploughed land yearly, i.e., they plough up fresh portions of the ager or grass land every year, and there is always plenty left over which has never been ploughed.[524] Nothing could describe more clearly what is mentioned in the Welsh triads as 'co-aration of the waste.' The tribesmen have their scattered homesteads surrounded by the lesser homesteads of their 'servi.' And the latter join in the co-tillage of such part of the grass land as year by year is chosen for the corn crops, while the cattle wander over the rest. [p345]

This seems to have been the simple form of the open field husbandry of the Germans of Tacitus.

And this is sufficient for the present purpose; for whichever way this passage be read, it does not modify the force of the previous passages, which show how manorial were the lines upon which the German tribal system was moving even in this early and still tribal stage of its economic development, owing chiefly to the possession of serfs by the tribesmen. It gives us further a clear landmark as regards the use by the Germans of the open-field system of ploughing. Tacitus describes a husbandry in the stage of 'co-aration of the waste.' It has not yet developed into a fixed three-course rotation of crops, pursued over and over again permanently on the same arable area, as in 'the three-field system' afterwards so prevalent in Germany and England.

The tendency of the German tribal system unlike the Welsh towards the manor.

These are important points to have gained, but the most important one is that, notwithstanding the strong resemblances between the Welsh and German tribal arrangements, there was this distinct difference between them. The two tribal systems were not working themselves out, so to speak, on the same lines. The Welsh system, in its economic development, was not directly approaching the manorial arrangement except perhaps on the mensal land of the chiefs. The Welsh tribesmen had as a rule no servile tenants under them. The taeogs were mostly the taeogs of the chiefs, not of the tribesmen. Thus, as we have seen, when the conquest of Wales was completed, the tribesmen of the till then unconquered districts became freeholders under the Prince of Wales, and with no mesne lord over them. The taeogs [p346] became taeogs of the Prince of Wales and not of local landowners. So that the manor did not arise. But even in the time of Tacitus the German tribesmen seem to have already become practically manorial lords over their own servi, who were already so nearly in the position of serfs on their estates that Tacitus described them as 'like coloni.'

The German and Roman elements easily combined to make the manor.

The manor—in embryo—was, in fact, already in course of development. The German economic system was, to say the very least, working itself out on lines so nearly parallel to those of the Roman manorial system that we cannot wonder at the silent ease with which before and after the conquest of Roman provinces, German chieftains became lords of villas and manors. The two systems, Roman and German, may well have easily combined in producing the later manorial system which grew up in the Roman provinces of Gaul and the two Germanies.