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

XI. RESULT OF THE COMPARISON.

Strong evidence of connexion between Britain and the South German provinces during Roman rule, in the serfdom and in the open-field system which was its shell.

To sum up the result of the comparison made in this chapter between the English and the Continental open-field system and serfdom. The English and South-German systems at the time of the earliest records in the seventh century were to all intents and purposes apparently identical.

The mediæval serf, judging from the evidence of his gafol and services, seems to have been the compound product of survivals from three separate ancient conditions, gradually, during Roman provincial rule and under the influence of barbarian conquest, confused and blended into one, viz. those of the slave on the Roman villa, of the colonus or other semi-servile and mostly barbarian tenants on the Roman villa or public lands, and of the slave of the German tribesman, who to the eyes of Tacitus was so very much like a Roman colonus.

That peculiar form of the open-field system, which was the shell of serfdom both in England and on the Continent, also connects itself in Germany [p410] distinctly with the Romano-German provinces, whilst at the same time conspicuously absent from the less Romanised districts of Northern Germany.

It seems therefore inconceivable that the three-field system and the serfdom of early Anglo-Saxon records can have been an altogether new importation from North Germany, where it did not exist, into Britain, where it probably had long existed under Roman rule.

The Saxon invaders from North Germany hardly brought the three-field system into England.

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 northern coast. But if it be possible that a system of agriculture implying long-continued settlement, and containing within it numerous survivals of Roman elements, could be imported by pirates and the emigrants following in their wake, the possibility itself implies that the immigrants had themselves previously submitted to long-continued Roman influences.

On the whole we may adopt as a more likely theory the further suggestion of Hanssen, that if the three-field system was imported at all into England, [p411] the most likely time for its importation was that same period of Roman occupation during which he considers that it came into use in the Roman provinces of Germany.[628]

The Romans probably introduced the three-course rotation of crops.

Nor is there anything inconsistent with this suggestion in the irregular lines of the English open fields and their divisions, so different from those produced by the rectangular centuriation of Roman 'Agrimensores.' We must not forget that the open field system in its simpler forms was almost certainly pre-Roman in Britain as elsewhere; so that what the Romans added to transform it into the manorial three-field system probably was rather the three-course rotation of crops, the strengthening of the manorial element on British estates, and the methods of taxation by 'jugation,' than any radical alteration in the land-divisions or in the system of co-operative ploughing.[629]

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