Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/860

 LAND-TENURE

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LAND-TENURE

customs and supposed vestiges of the past discover- able centuries later when the Germanics were civilized by the Christian armies, and notably by those of Charlemagne, and when written records could first set down what had hitherto been fluctuating and perhaps recent legend.

The Western tribal system has another and a much greater importance. We know more about it; it formed the civilization of a much larger number of men, and of men far more cultivated and therefore of more influence upon the Roman mind. Of the Gallic system we know virtually nothing. At the British we can do no more than guess; but the survival of what is called " Celtic" habit in Ireland and its recru- descence (which is also a form of survival) in Wales, after the dissolution of Roman rule, instruct us. The characteristic of that civilization seems to have been an intense bond of blood and of common interest be- tween the members of one clan. Perhaps the most startling evidence of this is that, when the Catholic Church, for all its elaborate organization, strictly kept records, and, as it were, necessary machinery, took into its unity the independent Celtic tribes, even such an institution as the episcopate was influenced by the tribal scheme, and the bishop was at first the bishop of the tribe or of its monastic institute, not the officer of a municipality, as he was throughout all the rest of the known world.

The proportion of land which could properly be regarded as private property under the tribal sys- tem of the West varied indefinitely. Records, of course, only begin to exist with the advent, even after the fall of the Roman Empire, of Roman civiliza- tion, letters, religion, and law. Not until modern re- search was at work could the extent of communal ownership in the tribe be guessed at, for it is an idea alien to the earliest chroniclers who wrote in the Roman tongue and under Roman traditions. Even the Welsh written and oral traditions make it diffi- cult to establish a proportion, and certainly the learned in the fields of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish tribal custom are compelled, for all their learning, to present much more hypothesis than they do direct knowledge.

It is perhaps a just summary that the half of the tribal system which lay exterior to the Roman Em- pire in the British Isles was conditioned as to its pro- portion of private property against communal by the orographical circumstances in which it lived. The districts it occupied in Great Britain were mountain- ous; the mountain pastures, and the mountain waste, and the mountain forests were communal. The nar- row alluvial belts along the valley streams were in part communal as pasture, in part held co-operatively for tillage, and in some part — necessarily in the neigh- bourhood of habitations — particular and owned. In Ireland, where wide stretches of plain (though of moist plain, suitable chiefly for pasturage) contrasted with the mountain districts, private property in the full Roman sense was modified — as it was modified, for that matter, in the small private properties of the Welsh and Scottish valleys — by a political or ethical character common to the whole tribal system, which was its intensely military character — a character which, it should be remembered, the so-called Celtic tribes of the West poured like an invigorating spiritual stream into the life of the early Middle .\ges. This character involved intense loyalties to the clan and to the person of a chief. The conception of an individual owning as agamst the clan, or defending his particular existence and its economic basis as against his chief, was a con- ception which, though present, was present as a vice and was odious to the spirit of that society. Owner- ship there was, for there was theft; and a sense of ownership in land, for thc^re are plenty of examples of men raging against unjust spoliation of that form of property as they would rage against unjust spoliation

of any other form of property. But the clan was above all military, and the private property, however absolutely felt or universally recognized, was subject' to the spirit of sacrifice which is essential to the mili- tary temper.

A general appreciation of the tribal spirit of the West, though historically of the first importance, since the Middle Ages were principally inspired by it, does not greatly affect the particular history of land-tenure, because it bears, both numerically and institutionally, so slight a relation to the vast, compact, and stable civilization of Rome, whose inter- nal transformation can alone explain the gradual change from the Roman conception of ownership to the feudal system.

A third province of evidence which would be of the utmost importance to our inquiry is unfortunately lacking and can never be recovered: I mean, the evi- dence of southern and eastern Britain. There cer- tainlj- took place an infiltration of tribes, and often, perhaps, of single families, from the Germanics into southern and eastern Britain during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. There is no manner of doubt that, from a position originally subsidiary and perhaps insignificant under the Roman Empire, the German- speaking population of southern and eastern Britain increased enormously up to the advent of St. Augus- tine, just before the dawn of the seventh century. There is again no manner of doubt that the attacks of pirates, who were probably also mainly speakers of Teutonic dialects, from being harassing in the third, and menacing in the fourth, had become a scourge in the fifth century; and the weight of legend, though it is only legend, is too strong to be ignored where it describes their progress in the sixth. A certain num- ber of Roman towns in Britain were actually taken by assault, some perhaps by the pirates alone, some by a combination of these with other Barbarians such as the Celtic Northerners beyond the Roman Wall. At any rate, although there is no direct record, and even in the way of myth only very misleading traditions, upon the worst 150 years of the business, and though southern and eastern Britain disappears from history during that period, yet we may confidently say that the society resulting from the pirate invasions, the resistance of the Roman cities, and the independent British tribes which joined in the fray, was a society exhibiting, after its conversion, a greater number of tribal features than that of any other province for- merly imperial.

If we had any evidence upon the state of society thus in process of formation, we might establish an in- teresting body of facts, and it might even appear that what is called "Teutonic" custom was of a sort calcu- lated to affect Roman society in the direction of feu- dalism. Unfortunately, we possess no such evidence. The first clear description of the mixed society pro- duced by the pirate invasions and the spread of Ger- man dialects comes too late for our purpose, and there remains for the historian nothing but the very un- profitable business of guesswork as to what the tribal organization may possiblj' have been in the homes of the pirates before they took the sea, or among the half- independent British tribes surrounding the Roman societies in the decline of the Roman power. By the time clear records are developed under the influence of the Clmrch, nothing in the way of true tribal organiza- tion remains. The Roman municipalities have sur- vived the shock, and are all, with the exception of three, upon their feet. The agricultural arrange- ments of the village have certain local characteristics which appear to differentiate it from its counterpart in Gaul, but these differences are slight and unimpor- tant; and with the exception of the increasing change in the popular language (the German elenients of which spread further and further), of a considerable admixture of new blood (how much we cannot tell), of