Having thus cleared the way, M. Fustel began to put together his materials for the great work of his life, the Histoire des Institutions Politiques, in its new form. He had issued one volume and prepared for publication a second when he was prematurely lost to the world. His pupils have, indeed, been able to put together a third volume from his manuscript and from earlier articles; and a fourth and fifth are promised us. But these fragmentary sketches, written many of them under the shadow of approaching death, are only slight indications of what M. Fustel might have done for mediæval history. Nevertheless, his work, incomplete as it is, is of the utmost weight and significance; in my opinion, it has done more than that of any other scholar to bring back the study of mediæval society, after long aberrations, to the right lines. We have to continue the work of inquiry along those lines, and in his spirit. “It is now,” said he, in the Preface to the Recherches, “twenty-five years since I began to teach; and each year I have had the happiness to have four or five pupils. What I have taught them above everything else has been to inquire. What I have impressed upon them is not to believe everything easy, and never to pass by problems without seeing them. The one truth of which I have persistently endeavoured to convince them is that history is the most difficult of sciences.” And again, in the Introduction to L’Alleu, “Of late years people have invented the word sociology. The word history had the same sense and meant the same thing, at least for those who understood it. History is the science of social facts; that is to say, it is sociology itself.” “The motto he had chosen, a motto,” says one of his pupils, “which sums up his whole scientific life, was Quaero.”
It is curious to observe how slow English scholars have been to realise the importance of these recent volumes. Is it because theories of mediæval history, which are not more than twenty or thirty years old, have already hardened into dogma, and we shrink from the reconstruction which might be necessary were we to meddle with any of the corner-stones? Some consolation, however, may be found in the fact that a considerable effect has been produced by the work of an English investigator, who was quite independently arriving, though from a different point of view, at very similar conclusions. Mr. Seebohm’s English Village Community, it is no exaggeration to say, revealed to us, for the first time, the inner life of mediæval England. By making us realise not only how uniform was the manorial system over the greater part of England, but also how burdensome were the obligations of the tenants, it forced us to reconsider the accepted explanation of its origin. For the explanation generally accepted was that manors had come into existence piecemeal, by the gradual subjection, here in one way, there in another, of the free landowners to their more powerful neighbours. Mr. Seebohm made it appear probable that the lord of the manor, instead of being a late intruder, was from the first, so far as England was concerned, the owner of the soil and the lord of those who tilled it; that the development has been in the main and from the first an advance from servitude to freedom; and not an elevation after long centuries of increasing degradation.
Mr. Seebohm has not, perhaps, been so convincing in the explanation he has to offer of the origin of the manor; but there is now a marked tendency to accept what is, after all, his main contention—that the manorial system was in existence, not as an exceptional phenomenon, but as the prevailing form of social organisation very soon, at any rate, after the English Conquest. There is absolutely no clear documentary evidence for the free village community in England. As to the word mark, not even Kemble, who first introduced it to English readers, could produce an example of its use in English documents in the sense of land owned by a community; and Anglo-Saxon scholars now point out that his one doubtful instance of mearcmót [A.D. 971] and his three examples of mearcbeorh are most naturally explained as having to do with mark merely in the sense of a boundary.[1] Not only is there no early evidence; the arguments based on supposed survivals into later times seem to melt away on close examination. It has, for instance, been maintained that even in the Domesday Survey there are traces of free communities. But the supposed Domesday references are of the scantiest, and certainly would not suggest the mark to anyone who was not looking for it. Most of them seem easily susceptible of other interpretations; in some of them we probably have to do with two or three joint-owners, in others very possibly with villages where the lord has been bought out.[2] Another and more usual argument is derived from the Court Baron, which was described by later legal theory as absolutely essential to a manor, and yet of such a constitution that it could not be held unless there were at least two free tenants to attend it. But legal historians are beginning to regard the Court Baron as not at all primitive, but rather as a comparatively late outcome of feudal theory.[3]
It must be granted that there is little direct evidence prior to the 9th century in disproof of the free community; but all the indirect evidence seems to tell against it. Gibbon long ago pointed out that the grant by the King of the South Saxons to St. Wilfrid, in the year 680, of the peninsula of Selsey (described as “the land of 87 families”), with the persons and property of all its inhabitants, showed that there, at any rate, there was a dependent population; especially as Bede goes on to tell us that among these inhabitants there were 250 slaves. And there are two still more considerable pieces of evidence to which due attention has hardly been given. The one is that the great majority of the early grants of land, beginning as early as 674, expressly transfer with the soil the cultivators upon it, and speak of them by precisely the same terms, cassati and manentes, as were in contemporary use on the Continent to designate prædial serfs.[4] The other is that, as in the rest of Western Europe the whole country was divided into villæ, each villa being a domain belonging to one or more proprietors, and cultivated by more or less servile tenants,[5] so in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, written in 731, the ordinary local division is also villa, often specifically described as villa regia or villa comitis. He does indeed use vicus or viculus a dozen times; but in three of these cases the word regis or regius is added, and in two the term villa is also used in the same chapter for the same place.[6] These five examples, it may further be noticed, occur in a narrative of the events of the middle of the seventh century,—a period near enough to Bede’s own time for his evidence to be valuable, and yet within a century and a half after the conquest of the districts in question.
The absence, however, of direct evidence in proof of the original free community in England, and the presence of much indirect evidence in its disproof, have hitherto been supposed to be counterbalanced by the well-ascertained existence of the mark among our German kinsfolk, and by the results of “the comparative method,” especially as applied to India. Let us take the markgenossenschaft first. It is a little difficult to discover the exact relation between Kemble and Maurer; but the obvious supposition is that it was from Maurer that Kemble derived his main idea; and it has usually been supposed that however Kemble may have exaggerated the action of the mark in England, in Germany it could be traced with unhesitating certainty. This is what, to Englishmen, gives especial interest to the essay of M. Fustel de Coulanges translated in the present volume.
M. Fustel begins with the ironical announcement that he does not intend to criticise the theory of the mark in itself, but only to examine the documentary evidence alleged in its favour, and to determine whether such evidence can fairly be given the construction that Maurer puts upon it. But here M. Fustel does some injustice to himself; for in following a detailed criticism of this character the reader is apt to overlook or forget the really important points which the writer succeeds in establishing. It may be well to state these points in our own way and order, as follows: (1) That the mark theory derives no direct support from the language of Cæsar and Tacitus; (2) That the word mark in early German law means primarily a boundary, usually the boundary of a private property; and then, in a derivative sense, the property itself, a domain such as in Gaul was called a villa; (3) That early German law is throughout based on the assumption of private property in land, and never upon that of common ownership, whether by a whole people or by a village group; and that whatever traces there may be of earlier conditions point to rights possessed by the family and not by any larger body; (4) That the one direct proof of a custom of periodical redistribution of the village lands is derived from an evident blunder on the part of a copyist; and that the rest of the evidence has nothing at all to do with periodical divisions; (5) That the term common as applied to fields and woods in early German law means common to, or shared by two or more individual owners; (6) That the commons, allmende, common of wood and similar phrases, which occur frequently in documents of the ninth and succeeding centuries, point to a customary right of use enjoyed by tenants over land belonging to a lord; and that there is no evidence that the tenants were once joint owners of the land over which they enjoyed such rights; (7) That there is no evidence in the early Middle Ages of mark assemblies or mark courts; and finally, the most important point of all, (8) That to judge from the earliest German codes, great states cultivated by slaves or by various grades of semi-servile tenants were the rule rather than the exception even at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Professor Lamprecht, whom M. Fustel treats as a mere follower of Maurer, is naturally sore at the treatment he here receives; and indeed his great work on German economic history is of the utmost utility as a collection of facts relative to later centuries, even though he does start with the assumption of the mark. But it is scarcely an answer to M. Fustel to argue, as Professor Lamprecht does,[7] that nothing depends on the word “mark;” and that the chance absence of a modern technical term from our meagre evidence does not prove the non-existence of the thing it is used to designate. For our evidence is not meagre; and M. Fustel proves not only the absence of the name, but also the absence of all the alleged indications of the existence of the thing.
The second line of defence is the evidence of “comparative custom.” India, at any rate, it is urged, displays the village community: there we may see, crystallised by the force of custom, conditions which in Europe have long since passed away. Now it is, of course, true that the village is “the unit of all revenue arrangements in India;”[8] that, over large districts, cultivation is carried on by village groups; and that in some provinces, notably the Punjab, this village group is at present recognised as the joint owner of the village lands. But it is a long step from this to the proposition that “the oldest discoverable forms of property in land,” in India, “were forms of collective property;”[9] and that all existing rights of private ownership have arisen from the break-up or depression of the original communities. The truth is, that of late years Indian facts have been looked at almost exclusively through the spectacles of European theory. Now that the mark is receding into improbability, it is urgently to be desired that Indian economic history should be looked at for what it will itself reveal.[10] It would be unwise to anticipate the results of such an investigation. But there is one preliminary caution to be expressed; we must take care not to exaggerate the force of custom. Professor Marshall, in his recent great work, has indicated some of the reasons for believing that custom is by no means so strong in India as is generally supposed;[11] and it is to be hoped that he will see his way to publishing the not-inconsiderable mass of evidence that he has accumulated.
As to supposed analogies with the mark in the practices of other peoples, all that can be said at this stage is that most of them prove only a joint-cultivation and not a joint-ownership. Thus, the Russian mir, which is often referred to in this connection, has always in historical times been a village group in serfdom under a lord: the decree of Boris Godounoff, frequently spoken of as the origin of serfdom, in that it tied the cultivators to the soil, may much more readily be explained as an attempt to hinder a movement towards freedom. It was indeed in all probability a measure somewhat similar in character to the English “statutes of labourers.”[12] With regard to the various more or less savage peoples, who are said to live under a system of common village ownership, the bulk of the evidence is, as M. Fustel observes, of the most unsubstantial character. There are lessons in the work of M. Emile de Laveleye which M. Fustel fails to recognise; and to these we shall return; but to the main proposition which it was intended to prove, M. de Laveleye’s book can hardly be regarded as adding much strength.
We see, then, that there is no very adequate reason, either in German, Indian, Russian, or any other supposed analogies, why we should not suffer ourselves to be guided in our judgment as to England by English evidence. And this evidence, as we have seen, would lead us to the conclusion that very soon after the English Conquest, if not before, the manor was the prevailing type of social organisation. The further question still remains, what was its origin? This is a question which cannot as yet be answered with certainty; but we are able to point out the possible alternatives. For this purpose we must look for a moment at each of the peoples that have successively occupied England. Fortunately, there is no need to go back to the very beginning, to the palæolithic inhabitants of Britain who dwelt in the caves and along the river-shores. Scanty in number, they were extirpated by the more numerous and warlike race that followed; very much as the Esquimaux, the kinsfolk, as it would seem, of prehistoric cave-men, are being harried out of existence by the North American Indians. There seems no reason to suppose that these people contributed in any measure to the formation of the later population of England.[13] But with the race that took their place, a race of small stature and long heads, the case is different. Ethnologists have long been of opinion that these pre-Aryans were to a large extent the ancestors of the present inhabitants of Western Europe; and they have of late won over to their side a rising school of philologers,[14] some of whom go so far as to explain the whole of modern history as the outcome of a struggle between a non-Aryan populace and a haughty Aryan aristocracy.[15] Without admitting any such hazardous deductions, we may accept the statement that the blood of these pre-Aryan people—Iberians, as it has become usual to call them—is largely represented in the English nation of to-day. Mr. Gomme has accordingly hazarded the supposition that our later rural organisation is in part derived from the Iberian race. He maintains that the traces of “terrace-cultivation,” which we come across here and there in England and Scotland, point to a primitive Iberian hill-folk, whose “agricultural system,” in some unexplained way, “became incorporated with the agricultural system of the,” later Aryan, “village community.”[16] His argument turns chiefly on certain alleged Indian parallels. But even if his examples proved the point for India, which is hardly the case, there is in Britain certainly no evidence for Mr. Gomme’s contention. If the terrace-cultivation is to be assigned to a prehistoric people, the archæological data would apparently place it in the bronze period[17]—an age long subsequent to the Celtic immigration. And it will be seen from what we have to say of the Celtic inhabitants at a much later period that it is hardly worth while to dwell upon the possibilities connected with their predecessors.
For, to judge from the account given by Cæsar[18]—who had abundant opportunities of observation—the Britons, at the time of his invasion, were still, except in Kent, in the pastoral stage. After speaking of the inhabitants of Kent as far more civilised than the rest, he goes on to say, “most of those in the interior sow no corn, but live on flesh and milk.” Even if his statement is not to be taken literally, there is this further reason for believing that the village community was not in existence among the Britons, viz., that it did not appear in those parts of the British Isles of which the Celts retained possession until after they became subject to external influences at a much later date. Neither in Wales, nor in the Highlands, nor in Ireland, can we find the village community until modern times.[19] There was, indeed, some agriculture even when the life was most pastoral. This agriculture was carried on upon the “open-field” plan. There was, moreover, a large number of dependent cultivators. But there was nothing like the village group as it was to be found in mediæval England.