ABSTRACT
A widespread and erroneous impression still prevails among the contemporaries to the effect that the Middle Ages were the organic sequence of Classical Civilization, and that under the influence of organized Christianity a level of culture and ethics was attained far superior to the finest moral achievements of Antiquity. When the Teutonic peoples first appear in recorded history, they were in the later stages of the Kinship phase organized into patriarchal clans or septs, that is, descent was reckoned through the male, and he was the master. In the time of Caesar and Tacitus the Germans had Kinship groups, though these were already patriarchal. Before the Migration of Peoples, which ended in the break-up of the Roman Empire, the clansmen dwelt in their own villages, that is, groups of houses. During and immediately after the Migration of Peoples there took place among the Teutons that enormous upheaval and transformation which leads out of Tribalism into the Patriarchal Family.
