'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.