Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/87

 Rh of Tacitus on the one side and the Brehon tracts and Welsh laws on the other side of Gaul, employed the open field system of husbandry. This system had its origin probably in the agricultural arrangements of the tribes during the pastoral stage of their evolution. Pasture being their main point, they obtained their corn by ploughing up each year a portion of their pasture lands, letting it go back into pasture when the crop was removed, thus, as Tacitus puts it, ' changing their arable area every year.' The Welsh laws speak of this method as 'co-aration of the waste,' and also testify to the rotation in which the ploughed strips were taken by the tribesmen. This arrangement of pastoral tribes, so simple and so widely spread, produced the two main characteristics of the open field system, viz. the intermixture of the strips and the vaine pâture over them. We see this both in Germany and Wales, and it seems to me to be probable that this system was the one used by the Gallic tribes. If so the system may well have survived the gradual changes of ownership and management, and the growth of the manorial system upon it, all through the Roman, Merovingian, and later periods.

But still the fact has to be accounted for, that M. Fustel de Coulauges as already said, unrivalled in his intimate knowledge of the texts, was able to find little or no evidence of the existence of the open field system in the early documents of French history. In a letter written in 1885, he stated to me that he had found in France no trace, or hardly any trace, of the open field system to which the English documents witnessed so clearly, and that he was even inclined to attribute it to a German origin. His most recent volumes, including L'Alleu et le Domaine Rural, do not testify to any change in his views. His opinion must therefore carry with it unusual weight.

But so careful and so faithful is his analysis and description of what he finds in the documents, that it is not needful, I think, to go outside his own pages for the facts and the proofs that are needed of the omnipresence of the open field system.

It is, I think, only when we carry with us the key which the main traits of the open field system afford to the meaning of the Saxon documents, and apply it to the French documents, that we recognize the practical identity between the Saxon 'yardlands' and the French ' mansi.' Not that they were necessarily exactly alike in all respects, but that they both were open field and scattered holdings.

In the Domesday survey and in the Rectitudines we find England divided into estates or manors, and the manors