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

(2) There were the Northern tribes outside the Roman province,[527] some of them tributary to the [p349] Romans and some of them hostile, the Frisii, the Chatti (or Hessians), and other tribes, reaching from the German Ocean to the mountains, and occupying the country embracing the upper valleys of the Weser and the Elbe, some of which tribes afterwards joined the Franks and Saxons.

The Suevic tribes on the borders.

(3) There were the Suevic tribes[528] so familiar to Cæsar, and amongst whom were the Angli and Varini, the Marcomanni and Hermunduri, always hovering over the limes of the provinces from the Rhine and Maine to the Danube: some of them hostile and some of them friendly; some of whom afterwards mingled with the Franks and Saxons, but most of whom were absorbed in the Alamannic and the Bavarian tribes who finally, following the course of the previous emigration, passed over the limes and settled within the 'Agri Decumates' in Rhætia, and in the Roman province of Upper Germany.

Distant tribes.

(4) Behind all these tribes with whom the Romans came in contact were others vaguely described as lying far away to the north and east.

The habits of which of these widely different classes of German tribes did Tacitus describe?

The Suevic tribes most in his mind probably.

Probably it would not be safe to go further than to say that the Germans whose manners he was most likely to describe were those chiefly Suevic tribes hovering round the limes of the provinces, especially of the 'Agri Decumates,' with whom the Romans had most to do. It is at least possible that he left out of his picture, on the one hand, those distant northern or eastern tribes who may still have retained their early nomadic habits, and on the other hand those [p350] Germans who had silently and peaceably settled within the limes of the Roman provinces, and so had become half Roman.[529]

But to what class are we to refer the settlements represented by the local names with the supposed patronymic suffix?

The patronymic local names imply fixed settlement.