Among the Germans, as among the Hindoos, juridical and economic relations were very scanty. Testamentary dispositionwas unknown in Germany, as in India before the English con- quest. Succession only applied to the dwelling-house, with theappendant inclosure, and this passed to the eldest. The brothers in many cases remained with him, thus forming a patriarchalfamily dwelling under the same roof. Sometimes they constructed separate habitations in the same inclosure for the brotherswho married. The women had no right of succession. M. Hanssen, who was one of the first to throw light on this subject,asserts that in Denmark five or six families often lived together on the same farm. It is the same family group which we findin France in the middle ages, in Mexico in times past, and in Lombardy even at the present day.
Originally at Rome, as well as in Germany and India, the paterfamilias could not dispose of the family property bytestament. The clans dwelt in houses grouped together into a village: this was the vicus or pagus . The aggregation of clansformed the nation ( populus ), and the state ( civitas ), which had in its centre a fortified place or citadel, nearly always situatedon an eminence. In Greece a very similar organization is met with. The method in which the institutions of legislators and thetreatises of philosophers deal with property, shifting it and dividing it again without scruple, shews that the recollection of aperiodical partition of land had not been effaced. In Crete, according to Aristotle, all the families lived by means of publicmeals, on the produce of the land cultivated by serfs or perioeci . There was, in fact, the system of common ownershipapplied to the land. (26)
During the middle ages the right to a share in the collective domain gradually ceased to be a personal right, and became areal right, a mere dependence on habitation. Only the owner of an entire farmstead ( Hube , Hoffstatt ) had a whole share inthe mark; he was a volhufner , vollmeier . Side by side with this class, we find "half-tenants" ( halbhufner , halbmeier ), whoconsequently had only a half or quarter of an entire share in the enjoyment of the communal property. Then there were the hintersassen , or settlers, who had been allowed on sufferance to stay on the collective territory, or else on private domains,and had no right of enjoyment except by paying an indemnity ( holzgeld , viehgeld ). The descendants of houseless members ofthe mark became like the hintersassen , mere proletarians, with neither lands of their own, nor rights over any. The right ofenjoyment in the fields, wood, meadow and water, was sold as an appendage of the hube . Hoba cum omnibus utilitatibus adeamdem hobam rite attinentibus id est marca, silva, sagina, acquis, pascuis . (27) In this way the German commune graduallylost its character of democratic equality, but traces of the old principle of the land being the common property of all, appearin the custom by which the alienation of land could only take place in the assembly of the people, (28) like the quiritary sale by mancipatio at Rome. Throughout the middle ages the sale could only be effected by the intervention of the communalmagistrates: the seller surrendered to them the property, which they subsequently transferred to the purchaser. (29) This was inrecognition of the eminent right of the commune over its territory.
1. Mackenzie Wallace, Russia , Vol. II. c. xxi. p. 45.
2. Ansichten der Volkewirthschaft: Ueber die Landwirthschaft der ältesten Deutschen .A French translation of thin workhas recently appeared bearing the title " Recherches sur divers sujets d'économie politique , by M. W. Roscher." The entirepassage in Tacitus in as follows: Agri pro numero cultorum ab universis per vices occupantur, quos mox inter se secundumdignationem partiuntur; fccilitatem partietidi camporum spatia praestant. Arva per annos mutant et superest ager; necenim cum ubertate et amplitudine soli labore contendunt, ut pomaria conserant et prata aeparent et kortos rigent: solaterrae seges imperatur .
3. Essartage or essartement in a method of cultivating forest land, still employed in some districts of the north-east ofFrance. It is performed by digging up all the vegetation on the surface, and then submitting the soil to écobuage . The soil inafterwards cultivated for two or three yearn, and then left for fresh essartage after fifteen or eighteen years.
Ecobuage is an operation which consists in raining the surface layer of soil, and burning the organic matter contained in it.
Littré, Diet.]
4. Allowing 10 hectolitres of corn as the produce of a hectare, a village of 200 inhabitants would require 200 hectares ayear; which demands a cultivable territory of 4,000 hectares for a rotation of twenty years. The Germans had a relativelylarge number of cattle, and one must, therefore, add another 1,000 hectares of pasturage and 1,000 hectares of forest. Thedensity of the population would be reduced to three or four inhabitants to the square kilometre, or hundred hectares. On thincomputation, Germany would have contained two millions of inhabitants.
[Adopting English measures:on the supposition that an acre would yield 11 bushels of corn, 200 inhabitants would require500 acres a year. And the whole cultivable land would have to be 10,000 acres, with an additional 2,500 acres of pasturageand the same amount of forest. The population would, therefore, be about one to every 150 acres.]
5. De Bell. Gal . 1. vi. c. 22.
6. Advertendum in hoc temporum antiquitate Germanos habuisse domum quam vocabant Sal; Circe domum fuisse Salbuckseu curtim, gallicè courtil, spetiumve terrae domui circumdatum et saepe cinctum spatium, illud cum domo est seliland,seu terra salica quae ad solos filios pertinebat; nec immerito, quam filiae in aliam domum terramque salicam transirent .
