Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/112

98 Saxon kings do not profess to cover the whole ground of existing and well-understood custom. Rather should special laws be regarded as modifications of custom made necessary at different periods by new circumstances. Thus no one set of laws can be expected to give a general view of custom as a whole." The custom Mr. Seebohm is alluding to in these passages and throughout his book is, of course, that body of unwritten law which governs the people as much in tribal society as the codes of written law govern the people in more developed societies. Custom is not the equivalent of unwritten law, and we get a limited view of tribal custom when it is used to connote that important body of tribal rules which, when the state has evolved into some sort of stability, have to to be codified as one of the recognised governing forces in the hands of the sovereign power. Indeed, but for this limitation of the term custom, Mr. Seebohm could have found many important illustrations which would have helped his elucidation of tribal conditions—illustrations not appearing in the codified laws, but which nevertheless may more properly be called tribal custom than the usages and rules of tribal society upon which alone he has relied for his evidence.

Mr. Seebohm has taken up this part of the evidence at the wrong end of his important studies. In the last chapter of his new book he labours to fit in its results with the results of his former studies. The English Village Community and The Tribal System in Wales. Our readers will remember that the former of these two brilliant essays was published just when students were beginning to feel the want of details wherewith to fill up the lacunar left by Sir Henry Maine's remarkable generalisations. It seemed to be so perfectly logical, and so well-reasoned on a basis of firm fact, that there was little hope for those who had not till then subscribed to the doctrine that Roman civilisation in Britain was the source of almost all our early economic and social life. The appearance a little later of Professor Vinogradoff's Villeinage in England, Mr. Andrews' Old English Manor, and some other studies, brought back the subject to the higher level of comparative jurisprudence; but not, we think, completely, because Mr. Seebohm's weighty conclusions still stood in the way. Now, however, Mr. Seebohm himself appears in the field against his earlier work. It is true that he strives to point out where this last study confirms his earlier, but he leaves out of account the points where it not