Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 n
was so generally done by the Germanic conquerors of
Gaul. Instead of compact villages, there were elongated
villages, scattered hamlets, or isolated farmsteads, and
the number of slaves was large.1 While the more com-
plete driving out of the Celts in the east probably helps
to account for this difference in type of settlement be-
tween east and west, yet there is much that is not at
present explainable; and there are striking exceptions: in
Essex, for example, the western type was the more common.
Between these two types of settlement, there were
doubtless many variations. There may also have been
places where the Roman villa, that great estate,
owned by one lord and worked by slaves and coloni,
was taken possession of by the conqueror, who now
became the lord, and, as far as he was able, continued
this Roman agrarian unit without change. Evidence of
any survival of the villa system is not positive; and, as it
could never have been widespread in Britain, the extent
to which it survived the Roman evacuation, was continued
by the Britons, and finally adopted by the Anglo-Saxons,
must have been very slight. But though not traceable to
Rome, these Anglo-Saxon settlements appear to have had
an element of aristocracy, of landlordism, *n them from
the start, and this element strengthened as time passed,
So from earliest times there are traces of rights and claims
which seem to us individual and those which seem com-
munal. It was no one's thought to make a doctrinaire
separation between these. "Both principles were com-
bined according to the lie of the land, the density of popu-
lation, the necessities of defence, the utility of co-opera-
tion/'2
1 See the charts, illustrating the two types of settlement and their per-
sistence to the present time, in Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond,
between pp. 16 and 17.
3 Vinogradofl: in Cambridge Medieval History, il, 637. The dilemma to
which historians formerly felt themselves bound, of tracing t the develop-
ment from communalism to individualism or else from individualism to
communaEsm, is vanishing with increasing knowledge; and we are now
face to face, as Maitland especially has shown, with the problem of tracing
progress from the vague to the definite.