Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/113

Rh only does not confirm it, but is actually in opposition to it. We would venture to say that had Mr. Seebohm begun his valuable work with the present volume, he would not have written his first work on the lines we know so well. It would have been impossible. The tribe with all its forces, its influences, and its principles was not present to him when he studied the survivals of the English village community. The only great economic and political force to which he could appeal was that of the Roman empire; and to this he went for the foundations of the English village system. But the village system is but a phase of the tribal system. It is as impossible to prove as it is impossible to conceive the village system with its limited economical conditions fitting into the Roman political system with its fully developed economical conditions. At the best there may be said to have been an apparent harmony with some features of the Roman system at the very fringes of the empire; but this is not enough to have founded a whole system such as is presented to view in Britain. It is possible, on the other hand, to trace many of the stages in the development from tribe to village, that is, in other words, from the tribe as an unstable group to the tribe as a settled community—from the Teutonic tribe to the Teutonic state; just as it is possible even now to perceive the main outline of the development from the Roman tribe to the Roman state.

This then appears to us to be the chief value of Mr. Seebohm's new study. It restores to view the tribe in the English system; and that, too, at the hands of the same scholar who in earlier days could not get back to the tribe in his progress from the known facts to the unknown ancestors of those facts.

Mr. Seebohm fixes his attention almost entirely upon the wergild of early tribal society—Celtic and Teutonic. V/ith a masterly hand he points out how this system of payment for crime against an individual penetrated to the recognised members of that individual's kin, and that in this recognised kinship is to be found the Celtic and Teutonic tribe. In particular the distinction, which is best illustrated in Beowulf, between the crime of killing a non-tribesman and the crime of killing a fellow-tribesman, is a very important illustration of the tribal system. The former case exposes the homicide's kin to the payment of the wergild, reckoned originally in cattle, and allows the kin of the dead man to receive the wergild, both payment and receipt