Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/389

Rh twelfth-century documents, a survival from earlier times or a creation of the Middle Ages? The author examines seriatim the statements of Cæsar and Tacitus which bear upon the former point. The well-known passages (De bello gallico, vi. 22, and Germania, 26, 2-5) are exhaustively analysed, and the latter is shown to refer to a system of culture instead of to one of tenure; whilst it is suggested that the "magistratus ac principes" of whom Cæsar speaks were in reality clan chiefs, the real owners of the soil, and that what he took for a compulsory division was an annual letting. There is however no attempt to deny the divergence between the statements of the two Roman historians, a divergence which the author refers partly to the improbability of but one custom having obtained throughout the whole of Germania, partly to differences in custom which may have taken place in the interval separating Tacitus from Cæsar. The earliest indications respecting the social organisation of the Germans are then examined, and the extreme unlikelihood is pointed out of communal tenure having flourished in the society depicted by the Roman historians, with its strongly-marked grades, its noble and its slave castes. The German law of inheritance is next dealt with. The slight glimpses afforded by Tacitus indicate a system in which the land is looked upon as the joint property of the family, and the object of legislation is to keep it undivided. This, though differing from individual ownership as we understand it, differs as widely, it need not be said, from what is understood by communal ownership. In the post-invasions sixth and seventh century codes, a strongly developed system of individual ownership is found with reminiscences, strongest in the earliest and least Romanised of these codes, of family ownership, but nothing in the least indicating communal ownership. These facts point, in the author's opinion, to a profound modification of the German family system during the invasions period. The facts adduced in the essay on the mark further support the theory that the Germans had house but no true village communities. The elaborate system described by Maurer belongs to the twelfth century. The word "marca" first appears in sixth-century documents, and then in a sense, in accordance with its probable etymological signification, of limit, division. The way in which its meaning grew from limit to