ABSTRACT
THE general picture drawn in this book of the social and economic development of the pre-Carolingian period, from the age of the folk migrations onwards, differs considerably from that which has usually been given. The conventional picture was one of backward and very primitive conditions. But this is completely at variance with the conditions which were known (even before the great achievements of modern epigraphical and papyrological research) to have prevailed in late Roman times, and in equally strong contrast with what the Germans actually achieved later, in the course of their settlement in the Roman provinces. If the people had been so backward at this time, how could the great task of land division have been carried out by Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Lombards, and Burgundians, as it is described ? The Germans would have been utterly incapable of maintaining in the same state of cultivation the wide acreage which had already been methodically and intensively tilled by the Romans ; and had they depended on the latter to do the work their position would soon have deteriorated, to a degree which would have brought them into economic subjection to their Roman consortes.
