This is very near to a recognition that the mansus embraced a bundle of strips. He comes still nearer when he identities the mansus of Gaul with the hoba of the Rhenish districts,[1] because these were very nearly allied to the English yardlands, and clearly were holdings under the open field system.
If the mansi of Gaul were not so originally, at what time was the open field system introduced into Gaul? How otherwise than by very ancient usage can the wide prevalence of the ancient traditional right of vaine pâture over the strips be accounted for? It cannot have been introduced all over France at a particular moment. It was a primitive Celtic no less than German incident to the open field system, and why should it be supposed that the Romans abolished it all over Gaul, and that it was reintroduced by the Franks, who in most other matters, according to M. de Coulanges, adopted Roman institutions in Gaul. Why should they break the continuity in agriculture alone? Is it likely that the Franks adopted the villa and the mansus and the system of services, but changed the character of the mansus from a more or less continuous area of two or three kinds of land into a bundle of strips?
If, on the contrary, we recognize that from the beginning the open field system was the prevalent system of husbandry in Gaul as in Germany and Britain, it is perfectly natural that the manorial system superimposed upon it should adopt and continue it. If this were so, it becomes also natural that the conveyancers, who knew perfectly well, as the Formulæ show, how to describe a vineyard or a field by boundaries, or by its neighbours on each side, should never describe a mansus in the same way, but only by the name of the colonus or other occupant or occupants of the mansus, just as the virgates were described in English legal documents. If the mansus were composed of two or three blocks of land, their boundaries could easily be given. But if it were, as it surely must have been, composed, like the holding of the English villanus, of a messuage and scattered acres, then it obviously could not, any more than the English yardland, be described by boundaries, and the methods of the mediæval conveyancers were the only methods that could well be adopted.
Again, to return to the Chartrain, and the holdings of the Abbey of St. Germain. described in the Breve de Buxido, there was here, as we have seen, a central manor house, with its demesne lands and with its mansi on the same estate, but the rest of the mansi
- ↑ L'Alleu, p. 370.
