[1171] In the A.-S. laws about tithes there is really no hint of communalism. When a landowner has ploughed his tenth acre, he is to assign that acre, or rather the crop that it will bear next year, to the church. That is all; and though it may be a rude plan, it is compatible with the most absolute individualism. Mr Seebohm, Village Community, 114, however, seems to think otherwise. As to the Welsh laws, we beg an enormous question if we introduce them into this context. A distribution of acres when the ploughing is done is just what we do not see in England.
[1172] As to the famous words of Tacitus ‘Agri pro numero cultorum ab uniuersis in uices [al. inuicem] occupantur’ and the proposal to read uniuersis vicis, one of the best suggestions yet made (Meitzen, Siedelung, iii. 586) is that Tacitus wrote merely ab uniuersis occupantur, that a copyist repeated the word uniuersis, and that other copyists tried to make sense of nonsense.
[1173] As to the state of things represented by the Lex Salica see Blumenstok, Entstehung des deutschen Immobiliareigenthums, Innsbruck, 1894, pp. 196 ff.
[1174] Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 155. It may be convenient now-a-days to say that ownership implies a power of alienation. See Pollock, Jurisprudence, 166. But to insist on this usage in such discussions as that in which we are engaged would lead to needless circumlocution. The question that is before us is whether as a complaint to which a court of law will give audience ‘This acre is mine’ is more modern than ‘This acre is ours.’
[1175] As to the whole of this matter see Meitzen, op. cit., especially iii. 574–589. As regards arable land in this country the only ‘survivals’ which point to anything that should be called communal ownership are singularly inconclusive. They relate to small patches of arable land held by burgesses: that is to say, they relate to places in which a strong communal sentiment was developed during the later middle ages, and they do not relate to communities that ought to be called agricultural. The ‘burgess plot’ is not large enough to have been any man’s livelihood when cultivated in medieval fashion, and it may well be modern. It is demonstrable that in one case a very ‘archaic’ arrangement was deliberately adopted in the nineteenth century by burgesses who preferred ‘allotment grounds’ to pasture rights. Maitland, Survival of Archaic Communities, Law Quarterly Review, ix. 36.
[1176] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 610–12.
[1177] Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 238. A hypothetical practice of endogamy will hardly give us the requisite explanation, for on the whole the church seems to have encountered little difficulty in imposing its extravagantly exogamous canons. To persuade the converts not to marry their affines was a much harder task.
[1178] Heusler, Institutionen, 229.
[1179] As to the ownership of land by ‘families,’ see Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 242.