We cannot, indeed, pretend to have discovered in the economic evidence a firm bridge for all purposes across the historic gulf of the fifth century, and to have settled the difficult questions who were the German invaders of England, whence they came, and what was the exact form of their settlements in one district or another. But the facts we have examined seem to have settled the practical economic question with which we started, viz. whether the hams and tuns of England, with their open fields and yard-lands, in the earliest historical times were inhabited and tilled in the main by free village communities, or by communities in villenage. However many exceptional instances there may have been of settlements in tribal households, or even free village communities, it seems to be almost certain that these 'hams' and 'tuns' were, generally speaking, and for the most part from the first, practically manors with communities in serfdom upon them.
The yard-land not the allodial allotment of a free tribesman.
It has become at least clear, speaking broadly, that the equal 'yard-lands' of the 'geburs' were not the 'alods' or free lots of 'alodial' freeholders in a common 'mark,' but the tenements of serfs paying 'gafol' and doing 'week-work' for their lords. And this is [p424] equally true whether the manors on which they lived were bocland of Saxon thanes, or folk-land under the 'villicus' of a Saxon king.
II. LOCAL EVIDENCE OF CONTINUITY BETWEEN ROMAN AND ENGLISH VILLAGES.
There yet remains one test to which the hypothesis of continuity between the British, Roman, and English village community and open-field system may be put.
Doubts as to the extermination of the British population by the English invaders.
It has sometimes been inferred, perhaps too readily, that the English invaders of Roman Britain nearly exterminated the old inhabitants, destroying the towns and villages, and making fresh settlements of their own, upon freshly chosen sites. If this were so, it would, of course, involve the destruction of the open fields round the old villages, and the formation of fresh open fields round the new ones.
The passage in Ammianus Marcellinus has sometimes been quoted, in which he describes the Alamanni, who had taken possession of Strasburg, Spires, Worms, Mayence, &c., as encamped outside these cities, shunning their inside 'as though they had been graves surrounded by nets.' [632] But this was in time of war, and no proof of what they might do when in peaceable possession of the country.
Mr. Freeman also has drawn a graphic picture of Anderida, with the two Saxon villages of Pevensey and West Ham outside of its old Roman walls, and no dwellings within them. But it would so obviously be [p425] much easier to build new houses outside the gates of a ruined city, or, perhaps, we should say rather fortified camp, than to clear away the rubbish and build upon the old site, that such an instance is far from conclusive. Nor does the fact that in so many cases the streets of once Roman cities deviate from the old Roman lines prove that the new builders avoided the ancient sites. It proves only that, instead of removing the heaps of rubbish, they chose the open spaces behind them as more convenient for their new buildings, in the process of erecting which the heaps of rubbish were doubtless gradually removed.
Is there evidence of continuity in the rural villages?