ABSTRACT
EARLIER scholars, in consequence of their conception of the so-called folk-migration and of the German conquest of the West Roman Empire, found themselves in a position of constraint when they came to describe German material civilization. For if the ancient and lofty civilization of the Romans had succumbed to the destructive inundations of the migration, and if all that Rome stood for had been swept away by the German barbarians during the conquest, the immediate consequence would be an interruption of civilization—a devastation in Voltaire’s sense—which necessitated the assumption that afterwards everything would have to be built up again from the beginning. These utterly uncivilized German conquerors would have gradually and painfully to rediscover and work out all that had once existed on the far side of that great burial ground of civilization. This would be true both in the economic and in the social sphere. If the Germans were depicted during the land occupation of the sixth century as free and equal peasants, so far without any political organization and if, therefore, they settled in communities of families, it would seem a plausible theory that their whole agrarian economy rested on associations which had a common right to the settled land, “ the Mark,” without any private ownership of arable. Within the framework of this picture there was as little room in early German society for the great estate as for a stronger social organization.
