Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/90

 70 contained in this document, and clustered for the purpose of supervision and management were scattered in various places twenty, thirty, or forty miles away from the manor house. Yet the tenants do weekly and other work on the demesne. On what demesne? Are we to imagine them toiling with their oxen and their ploughs twenty or forty miles away across the Chartrain to do their work or plough their perticæ or ansingæ on the demesne at headquarters? Certainly not. M. de Coulanges has recognized that the villa was an indivisible unit. The heirs of a holder, following old Roman usages, might take undivided portiones in the villa, or the owner might grant his portio, consisting of so many or such and such mansi to the Abbey of St. Germain, but the villa remained through all an undivided unit. The tenants did service on the demesne as before. The owner of a portio of the villa took in some way a portion of the net revenue or profits of the villa, including the tenants' payments and the produce of their work on the demesne. When, instead of an undivided portio of a villa, an abbey became the owner of this and that mansus, another course may have been adopted. Each manor house (mansus indominicatus), which formed a centre of a group of mansi scattered over a large or small district on this or that villa or estate, had its set of officials who were responsible for the collection of the payments, whether in money or in kind, from the scattered mansi belonging to the abbey. The produce of the perticæ and ansingæ or other areas ploughed and sown and reaped by the tenants for the abbey on strips belonging to their own holdings or set apart always for the abbey must somehow or other have been either garnered and kept for the abbey, or carried to the barns of the central manor, or sold and converted into money and accounted for to the abbey. The chapters devoted by M. Guérard to the consideration of these officials do not inform us exactly how this collection was managed, nor does the Polyptique itself afford the information. But the use of the word ansingæ over and over again in the Polyptique for the strip to be ploughed and sown and reaped for the Lord connects the method of payment of what in Saxon phraseology was called gafol-yrth, with the andecena of the Bavarian laws of the seventh century. So the mappa or napatica of the district round Rheims, which was another variety of the same thing, affords another connection, inasmuch as the mappa of Rheims and the andecena of the Bavarian laws were each 4 by 40 perticæ in area—the same shape, though not of the same size, as the English acre, thus again connecting and almost identifying the methods of Continental