It is evident that these mansi and sortes were not allodial lots in the common mark of a free village community, but the holdings of two grades of semi-servile and servile tenants on a manor; and it is evident that some of the services were survivals of the sordida munera exacted under Roman law. Surely the continuity in the mode of surrender and in the services and tribute on these South German manors, traced from the Theodosian Code to the Alamannic and Bavarian laws, and found again in the surrenders (identical with those described by Salvian) made under those laws, and also in the later surveys of the monastic estates, excludes the probability of their having been original settlements of German free village communities on the German mark system, such as G. L. von Maurer assumes that they were.
Manorial tendency of the Roman land-system.
These curious and numerous instances on which this writer relied as evidence of the mark-system, and as remains of a once free German village community, turn out in fact to be further instances of [p335] the progress under Frankish rule, within a once Roman province, of the practice described by Salvian—a practice which continued from century to century, helping on the threefold tendency (1) in the villa to become more and more manorial, i.e. more and more an estate of a lord with a village community in serfdom upon it; (2) for all land to fall under some manorial lordship or other, whether royal, ecclesiastical, monastic or private, and so to become part of a manorial estate; (3) for the originally distinct classes of 'free coloni' on the one hand, and slaves or servi on the other hand, to become merged in the one common class of mediæval serfs.
We have yet, however, to examine the German side of this continental economic history as carefully as we have examined the Roman side of it, before we shall be in a position to use continental analogies as the key to the solution of the English economic problem.
It may be that direct and important German elements also entered as factors in the manorial system, both during the period of Roman rule in the German provinces, and also after their final conquest by the German tribes.
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CHAPTER VIII. FOOTNOTES.
[339.] Liber de Hyda, p. 63.
[340.] Liber de Hyda, pp. 67 et seq.
[341.] The per-centage is under-estimated, owing to the repetition of various forms of the same name having been excluded in counting those ending in ham, but not in counting the total number of places.