In the earliest stage of these systems they were seemingly alike, both in the nomadic habits of the tribes, and the shifting about of the households in a tribe from one homestead to another. Sir John Davis describes this shifting as going on in Ireland in his day, and Cæsar describes it as going on in Germany 1,700 years earlier.
Co-aration of the waste on the early open-field system.
In both cases, such agriculture as was a necessity even to pastoral tribes was carried on under the open-field system in its simplest form—the ploughing up of new ground each season, which then went back into grass. The Welsh triads speak of it as a [p413] co-aration of portions of the waste. Tacitus describes it in the words, 'Arva per annos mutant, et superest ager.' In neither case, therefore, is there the three-field system, which implies fixed arable fields ploughed again and again in rotation.
The three-field system implies fixed settlements and rotation of crops, which came probably with Roman rule. The yard-land or hub implies servile tenants.
The three-field system evidently implies the surrender of the tribal shifting and the submission to fixed settlement. Further, as wherever we can examine the three-field system we find the mass of the holdings to have been fixed bundles, called yard-lands or huben—bundles retaining the same contents from generation to generation—it seems to follow either that the tribal division of holdings among heirs, which was the mark of free holdings, had ceased, or that the three-field system was from the first the shell of a community in serfdom.
The geographical distribution of the three-field system—mainly within the old Roman provinces and in the Suevic districts along their borders—makes it almost certain that, in Germany, Roman rule was the influence which enforced the settlement, and introduced, with other improvements in agriculture, such as the vine culture, a fixed rotation of crops.
In Wales the necessity for settlement did not generally produce the three-field system with holdings in yard-lands,[630] because, as the Welsh tribesmen, though they may have had household slaves, as a rule held no taeogs or prædial slaves, it produced no serfdom. But under the German tribal system, even in the time of Tacitus, the tribesmen in the [p414] semi-Romanised districts, at all events, already had prædial slaves.
The Roman villa another factor and grew into the manor.
The manorial system, however, was not simply a development from the tribal system of the Germans; it had evidently a complex origin. A Roman element also seems to have entered into its composition.
The Roman villa, to begin with, a slave-worked estate, during the later empire, whether from German influence or not, became still more like a manor by the addition of coloni and other mostly barbarian semi-servile tenants to the slaves.