It is very much to be desired that the open-field system of the various districts of France should be carefully studied in the same way. An examination of its widely extended modern remains could hardly fail to throw important light upon the contents of the cartularies which have been published in the 'Collection de Documents Inédits sur l'histoire de France,' amongst which the 'Polyptique d'Irminon,' with M. Guérard's invaluable preface, is pre-eminently useful.
In the meantime, whilst students had perhaps been too exclusively absorbed in working in the rich mine of early German institutions, Mr. Coote has done service in recalling attention in his 'Neglected Fact in English History' and his 'Romans of Britain' to the evidences which remain of the survival of Roman influences in English institutions, even though it may be true that some of his conclusions may require reconsideration. The details of the later Roman provincial government, and of the economic conditions of the German and British provinces, remain so obscure even after the labours of Mommsen, Marquardt, and Madvig, that he who attempts to build a bridge across the gulf of the Teutonic conquests between Roman and English institutions still builds it somewhat at a venture.
It is interesting to find that problems connected with early English and German Economic History are engaging the careful and independent research also of American students. The contributions of Mr. Denman Ross, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Professor Allen, of the University of Wisconsin, will be welcomed by fellow-students of these questions in the old country.
It has seemed to me that the time may have come when an inquiry directed strictly upon economic lines, and carefully following the English evidence, might strike a light of its own, in the strength of which the various side lights might perhaps be gathered together and some clear result obtained, at least as regards the main course of economic evolution in England.
The English, like the Continental village community, as we have said, inhabited a shell—an open-field system—into the nooks and corners of which it was curiously bound and fitted, and from which it was apparently inseparable.
The remains of this cast-off shell still survive in parishes where no Enclosure Act happens to have swept them away. The common or open field system can even now be studied on the ground within the township in which I am writing as well as in many others. Men are still living who have held and worked farms under its inconvenient rules, and who know the meaning of its terms and eccentric details. Making use of this circumstance the method pursued in this Essay will be, first, to become familiar with the little distinctive marks and traits of the English open-field system, so that they may be readily recognised wherever they present themselves; and then, proceeding from the known to the unknown, carefully to trace back the shell by searching and watching for its marks and traits as far into the past as evidence can be found. Using the knowledge so acquired about the shell as the key, the inquiry will turn upon its occupant. Examining how the mediæval English village community in serfdom fitted itself into the shell, and then again working back from the known to the unknown, it may be perhaps possible to discern whether, within historical times, it once had been free, or whether its serfdom was as old as the shell.
The relation of the 'tribal system' in Wales, in Ireland, and in Germany to the open-field system, and so also to the village community, will be a necessary branch of the inquiry. It will embrace also both the German and the Roman sources of serfdom and of the manorial system of land management.
It may at least be possible that Economic History may sometimes find secure stepping stones over what may be impassable gulfs in constitutional history; and it obviously does not follow that a continuity lost, perhaps, to the one may not have been preserved by the other. The result of a strictly economic inquiry may, as already suggested, prove that more things went to the 'making of England' than were imported in the keels of the English invaders of Britain. But whatever the result—whatever modifications of former theories the facts here brought into view, after full consideration by others, may suggest—I trust that this Essay will not be regarded as controversial in its aim or its spirit. I had rather that it were accepted simply as fellow-work, as a stone added at the eleventh hour to a structure in the building of which others, some of whose names I have mentioned, have laboured during the length and heat of the day.
In conclusion, I have to tender my best thanks to Sir Henry S. Maine for the kind interest he has taken, and the sound advice he has given, during the preparation of this Essay for the press; also to Mr. Elton, for similar unsolicited help generously given. To my friend George von Bunsen, and to Professor Meitzen, of Berlin, I am deeply indebted as regards the German branches of my subject, and to Mr. T. Hodgkin and Mr. H. Pelham as regards the Roman side of it. For the ever ready assistance of my friend Mr. H. Bradshaw, of Cambridge, Mr. Selby, of the Record Office, and Mr. Thompson, of the British Museum, in reference to the manuscripts under their charge, I cannot be too grateful. Nor must I omit to acknowledge the care with which Messrs. Stuart Moore and Kirk have undertaken for me the task of revising the text and translations of the many extracts from mediæval documents contained in this volume.
F. Seebohm.