It is most probable that whenever German conquerors descended upon an already peopled country where agriculture was carried on as it was in Britain, their comparatively small numbers, and still further their own dislike to agricultural pursuits and liking for lordship, and familiarity with servile tenants in [p419] the old country, would induce them to place the conquered people in the position of serfs, as the Germans of Tacitus seem to have done, making them do the agriculture by customary methods. If in any special cases the numbers in the invading hosts were larger than usual, they would probably include the semi-servile dependants of the chieftains and tribesmen. These, placed on the land allotted to their lords, would be serfs in England as they had been at home.
The yard-land shows this,
At this point, as we have seen, the internal evidence of the open-field system, at the earliest date at which it arises, comes to our aid, showing that as a general rule it was the shell, not of household communities of tribesmen doing their own ploughing like the Welsh tribesmen by co-aration, but of serfs doing the ploughing under an over-lordship.
Here the English evidence points in precisely the same direction as the Continental. For, as so often repeated, the prevalence, as far back as the earliest records, of yard-lands and huben, handed down so generally, and evidently by long immemorial custom, as indivisible bundles from one generation to another, implies the absence of division among heirs, and is accordingly a mark of the servile nature of the holding.
and also local names.
The earlier 'hams' and 'tuns' manors.
Further, whenever a place was called, as so many places were, by the name of a single person, it seems obvious that at the moment when its name was acquired it was under a land ownership, which, as regards the dependent population upon it, was a lordship. We have seen that in the laws of King Ethelbert the 'hams' and 'tuns' of England are spoken of as in a single ownership, whilst the [p420] mention of the three grades of 'læts' shows that there were semi-servile tenants upon them. And in the vast number of instances in which local names consist of a personal name with a suffix, the evidence of the local name itself is strong for the manorial character of the estate. When that suffix is tun, or ham, or villa, with the personal name prefixed, the evidence is doubly strong. Even when connected with an impersonal prefix, these suffixes in themselves distinctly point, as we have seen, to the manorial character of the estate, with at least direct, if not absolutely conclusive, force.
Whatever doubt remains is not as to the generally manorial character of the hams and tuns of the earliest Saxon records, or as to the serfdom of their tenants; as to this, it is submitted that the evidence is clear and conclusive. Whatever doubt remains is as to which of two possible courses leading to this result was taken by the Saxon conquerors of Britain.
As regards the methods of their conquest, there happens to exist no satisfactory contemporary evidence. They may either have conquered and adopted the Roman villas, whether in private or imperial hands, with the slaves and 'coloni' or 'tributarii' upon them, calling them 'hams,' or they may have destroyed the Roman villas and their tenants, and have established in their place fresh 'hams' of their own, which in mediæval Latin records, whether in private or royal possession, were also afterwards called 'villas.' In some districts they may have followed the one course, in other districts the other course. Either of the two might as well as the other have produced manors and manorial serfdom. [p421]
Survivals from the Romano-German province prove continuity, and are inconsistent with extermination