Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/172

158 the father’s property was clearly based on a sense of justice to all the children alike. Its primitive form was probably that in which the sons and daughters all had their shares. This was the custom of Frisia, and apparently that of the Northern Goths, for we find that some of their descendants at the present time in Sweden have the custom, and cling tenaciously to it. In Dalecarlia, where the people are of the purest Gothic descent, land is divided equally among all the children, and consequently the divisions have in some cases become very small. A farmer in Dalecarlia at the present time occasionally has 300 parcels of land over a district four miles square. In Götaland, also, the land is partible, and in case of sale the relatives have the first right of purchase. It is not difficult to understand how among a warlike people like the Saxons, or even the Goths themselves after they had left their Northern home, a modification of the partible inheritance custom of their ancestors might have been found necessary, and so that which in more ancient and perhaps more peaceful times had been shared by both males and females was limited under different conditions of life to male children only. This was the custom of the Germans as described by Tacitus. Male inheritance was the custom of the Saxons, and in the custom of gavelkind, by which daughters shared only in default of sons, it was, and is still, the custom in Kent, which was settled by Goths and Frisians.

In the laws of the Visigoths land is stated to be hereditary property, and there is special reference to its division among co-heirs. The rule of this code was equal division among sons and daughters alike. Just beyond the present border of Göteborg, on the south-eastern frontier of Norway, the river Glommen flows into the sea, and on