Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/86

 66 form another class with another set of services. The week-work of three days a week was attached to the mansi ingenuiles, whilst the mansi serviles 'do whatever else is necessary.'

However close the resemblance to later English services, it is no closer or less remarkable than the resemblance to the earlier services described in the Bavarian and Allamannic laws of the seventh century, and I have elsewhere endeavoured to show that there was a close historical connection between the latter and those of the later Roman colonate. I shall hardly do wrong in referring to the recent works of M. Fustel de Coulanges and to Professor Henry Pelham's valuable inaugural lecture on 'The Imperial Domains and the Colonate,' as having successfully traced the continuity between the later Roman colonate and the system adopted on the Imperial domains of the early Empire. Professor Pelham points out that in the inscription of the Saltus Burunitanus there is a clear example of the time of Hadrian of coloni on an Imperial estate bound for ever to the soil under a perpetual agreement, liable to pay certain fixed portions of the produce of their holdings, and to render certain services with their own hands as well as with their teams on the 'demesne,' including not more than two days' ploughings, two days' sowings, and two days' reapings, besides the labour with teams, the details of which are not given.

The continuity which M. Fustel de Coulanges has traced so carefully through the documents of Gaul from Roman to Merovingian times in his L'Alleu et le Domaine Rural pendant l'Époque Mérovingienne, was not broken in the next period, and it resulted in the condition of things described in the Polyptique d'Irminon, an example of which has been given.

But I can hardly think that it is enough to recognize continuity on what I may call the manorial side of the question, i.e. in the management of the estate and the services of the tenants, unless we also recognize the still wider and economically more important continuity in the open field system of husbandry. Are we to recognize the close resemblance in the services between the French mansi and half-mansi and the English virgates and half-virgates, and fail to recognize that both were bundles of mattered strips in the common fields, and subject after removal of the crops to the common right of pasture which the French call the vaine pâture?

The corn-growing districts of Gaul produced corn before the Roman conquest. This corn was grown under a tribal system which, if we may rely on the comparative evidence of the