Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/390

382 frontier, then to frontier territory, and ultimately to region, and from limit of a private property to the whole of that property, is illustrated by a number of examples from contemporary documents. In all cases the word "mark" is used in connection with a perfectly well defined system of private ownership in land. The history of the word is only followed up to the period when it is found associated with a system of village communities; and the author lets it be seen that he considers these, in so far as they are not an outcome of feudality, to be heirs of those older house communities, unmistakeable traces of which appear in the oldest records of German society. Looking merely at the facts disclosed in his analysis of Germanic custom, M. Fustel de Coulanges declares the hypothesis that absolute community has everywhere preceded family ownership, which, in its turn, has developed into private ownership, to rest upon no proved facts. The last of the four essays handles the subject of popular justice. Only a particular period is dealt with, the contemporary texts of which are however shown to discountenance the theory of a system of local and popular justice. The jurisdictions of the king and of the count appear as strongly established and free from popular control. The "Mallus" is the count's court, open to all subjects of the Frankish kings, and not a court of popular jurisdiction special to the Frankish invaders. The functions of the Rachimburgii are elaborately investigated, and are proved to relate solely to cases in which a money composition was offered. They were in fact a species of local "boards of arbitration," but when once the case passed out of their hands and came before the count they had simply a power of advice, but not of control. The author hints that in his opinion the system of local and popular justice found in the Middle Ages is, like the twelfth-century mark system, an outcome of the age rather than a survival from former ages. The first essay traces the growth of the Roman colony, and is in so far subsidiary to the main thesis of the work that the author evidently believes many of the customs referred by the school he combats to a primitive stage of society, to have had a similar development. The whole work may be commended as a model of sober, exact historical investigation, and as a contribution of first-rate importance to the history of institutions.