Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/515

 science and literature, The Protestant Revolution dwells on the social process underlying the intellectual revolt. The dogmatic history of the movement is treated in both cases as of secondary importance in comparison with the revival of domestic life. From this point of view the downfall of the religious orders appears as a wholesome reaction against the ‘blunder’ of celibacy and its political influence.

The principal contribution of Seebohm to historical studies is embodied in his books, The English Village Community (1883), The Tribal System in Wales (1895), and Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law (1902). These inquiries originated from an attempt to trace the historical conditions of the problem of population in England, of which some articles in the Fortnightly Review (1865–1870) present an outline. Seebohm became aware that it is not the simple relation between the supply of food and the demands of individuals to be fed that provides the solution of the problem, but that this solution is conditioned by the forms of economic organization. He was struck by the peculiar character of the open-field system which had prevailed in England for more than a thousand years. Communal farming with its inconvenient intermixture of strips, compulsory rotation of crops, common pasture, common waste, were traced by him to the so-called manorial system, which, in his view, was already in existence in the Roman villa; the organization of rural labour had proceeded on these lines with the same uniform regularity as the building up of hexagonal cells by bees; the communism of the open-field villages was derived from the fact that the labouring population was by custom subjected to the exploitation of lords who were endowed with rights of individual property; the disruption of the open-field community was considered as one of the aspects of progressive emancipation. Seebohm's argument fitted well into a widespread movement of revolt against a romantic conception of ancient Teutonic freedom which had been preached on the Continent by German scholars and advocated in England by E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green, and others. Fustel de Coulanges in France initiated independently a crusade against the Germanistic interpretation of mediaeval history, maintaining, among other things, that there had never existed such a thing as the village community, and assigning a decisive influence in the history of Western European origins to Roman institutions. In Germany itself G. F. Knapp and A. Dopsch criticized the doctrines derived from the study of Tacitus and of the barbarian laws, and laid stress on the organizing rôle played by the great estate. In this way Seebohm's teaching came in, as it were, on the crest of a wave of critical and constructive study.

Seebohm did not entrench himself, however, behind the one-sided conception of the great estate. He addressed himself to another and equally important line of development. His eyes were open not only to the vestiges of common husbandry in the home counties of England, but also to the scattering of homesteads in Wales and other Celtic districts. He devoted considerable attention to the practice of co-aration and to the joint family in this region. In his Tribal System in Wales he presented an extensive study of the Welsh kindred, its ramifications, its pastoral and agricultural peculiarities. Here was clearly a case of tribal, not servile, community; and Seebohm traced it to the authority of the patriarch, as he had traced the manorial arrangement to the authority of the military lord. He exaggerated to some extent this patriarchal authority as against the collective influence of the kindred, and he did not succeed in explaining the process by which tribal arrangements were transformed into the manorial system. But the strong emphasis given by his investigations to the kindred of tribesmen supplies an effective counterblast to the shallow simplifications to which some of the followers of his villa doctrine have committed themselves. His Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law contains interesting studies leading in the same direction, but it is far from being on the same level with his preceding work. In the posthumous volume on Customary Acres (1914) there are valuable observations on the continuity of land measurements, but it is a collection of materials rather than a definite statement of the subject. Seebohm was still at work on it when he died at Hitchin, after a protracted illness, on 6 February 1912.

Seebohm's greatest merit as a researcher was his sense of concrete reality in describing and explaining the remote and obscure past. Working from the known to the unknown, he succeeded in making himself at home in the surroundings of old England or of Welsh tribal life, and he introduces his readers to a strange world of archaic ideas and practices. His lucid exposition made his work accessible to a large circle of readers; it achieved also signal recognition in the world of learning, and the universities 489