Tithe lands let to villages, and worked under the open-field system.
It has been already mentioned that by far the greater part of the cultivated land is not private, but Government property, either miri or wakûf, and that the cultivator is merely the holder. Each district has certain tracts of such lands, and after the rains they are let to the different inhabitants in separate plots. The division is decided by lottery. Herr Schick has given an account of the manner in which this lottery takes place. All those who are desirous of land assemble in the sāha (an open place generally in front of the inns). The Imam, or khatib, who is writer, accountant, and general archivist to the whole village, presides over this meeting. The would-be cultivators notify how many ploughs they can muster. If a man has only a half-share in one, he joins another man with a like share. Then the whole number is divided into classes. Supposing the total number of ploughs to be forty, these would be divided into four classes of ten, and each class would choose a Sheikh to represent them. The land of course varies in quality, and this division into classes makes the distribution simpler. Say there are four classes, the land is divided into four equal portions, so that each class may have good as well as bad. When the Sheikhs have agreed that the division is fair, the lots are drawn. Each of the Sheikhs puts some little thing into the khatib's bag. Then the khatib calls out the name of one of the divisions, and some passing child is [p315] made to draw out one of the things from the bag, and to whichever Sheikh it belongs, to this class belongs the division named by the khatib. This decided, the Sheikhs have to determine the individual distribution of the land. In the case of ten ploughs to a class, they do not each receive a tenth piece of the whole, but, in order to make it as fair as possible, the land is divided into strips, so that each portion consists of a collection of strips in different parts of the village lands. The boundaries are marked by furrows or stones, and to move a neighbour's landmark is still accounted an 'accursed deed,' as in the days of ancient Israel (Deut. xix. 4). . . .
The measure by which the Fellahin divide their land is the feddân. It is decided by the amount which a man with a yoke of oxen can plough per day, and is therefore a most uncertain measure.
Was it so on the Roman tithe lands?
This description of the mode in which public land in Palestine is often let to individual tenants or to whole villages at a rent of a tenth of the produce, and further, the picture it gives of the cultivation of the land let to a village by those villagers who supply oxen for the ploughing on an open-field system so like that of Western Europe, at least may suggest the possibility of a somewhat similar system having been adopted in the management of the tithe lands of the 'Agri Decumates.'
The allusion to the division of the fields into strips, and to the unit of land measurement being the day's work of a pair of oxen, and, we may add, the use of the same unit of measurement throughout the Turkish Empire,[471] may at least prepare us to find [p316] indications of a somewhat similar system of cultivation on the tithe lands on the Danube and the Rhine when we come to examine their conditions under the early Alamannic and Bavarian laws.
And, lastly, this Eastern illustration of the modern management of 'tithe lands' may help us to give due weight to the suggestion of Sir H. S. Maine[472] that not only on the 'ager publicus,' but even on the Roman provincial villa itself, in the organisation of the mostly barbarian and servile tenants, and of the husbandry, many features may well have been borrowed from ordinary and wide-spread customs of barbarian communities, thus partially explaining what must again and again strike us in this investigation, viz., the ease with which Roman and barbarian elements combined during the later Roman rule of the provinces and afterwards in producing a complex and joint result—the typical manorial estate.
X. THE TRANSITION FROM THE ROMAN TO THE LATER MANORIAL SYSTEM.
Laws of the Alamanni, A.D. 622.
The Alamannic conquest of the province of Germania Prima, including what is now Elsass and the western part of the 'Agri Decumates,' may be described as almost a passive one. The population had long been partly German, and Roman provincial usages can hardly have been altogether supplanted in the fifth century. It was not till the Alamanni were themselves [p317] conquered by the Franks (who had in the meantime become nominally Christian) that their laws were codified. When this took place in the year 622 it was with special reference to the interests of the Church that the laws were framed, just as in the case of the first codification of Anglo-Saxon laws on King Ethelbert becoming a Christian.