Territorially the old Teutonic mark consisted of three divisions. There was the _village mark_, where the people lived in houses crowded closely together, no doubt for defensive purposes; there was the _arable mark_, divided into as many lots as there were householders; and there was the _common mark_, or border-strip of untilled land, wherein all the inhabitants of the village had common rights of pasturage and of cutting firewood. All this land originally was the property not of any one family or individual, but of the community. The study of the mark carries us back to a time when there may have been private property in weapons, utensils, or trinkets, but not in real estate.[3] Of the three kinds of land the common mark, save where curtailed or usurped by lords in the days of feudalism, has generally remained public property to this day. The pleasant green commons or squares which occur in the midst of towns and cities in England and the United States most probably originated from the coalescence of adjacent mark-communities, whereby the border-land used in common by all was brought into the centre of the new aggregate. In towns of modern date this origin of the common is of course forgotten, and in accordance with the general law by which the useful thing after discharging its functions survives for purposes of ornament, it is introduced as a pleasure-ground. In old towns of New England, however, the little park where boys play ball or children and nurses "take the air" was once the common pasture of the town. Even Boston Common did not entirely cease to be a grazing-field until 1830. It was in the village-mark, or assemblage of homesteads, that private property in real estate naturally began. In the Russian villages to-day the homesteads are private property, while the cultivated land is owned in common. This was the case with the _arable mark_ of our ancestors. The arable mark belonged to the community, and was temporarily divided into as many fields as there were households, though the division was probably not into equal parts: more likely, as in Russia to-day, the number of labourers in each household was taken into the account; and at irregular intervals, as fluctuations in population seemed to require it, a thorough-going redivision was effected. In carrying out such divisions and redivisions, as well as in all matters relating to village, ploughed field, or pasture, the mark-community was a law unto itself. Though individual freedom was by no means considerable, the legal existence of the individual being almost entirely merged in that of his clan, the mark-community was a completely self-governing body. The assembly of the mark-men, or members of the community, allotted land for tillage, determined the law or declared the custom as to methods of tillage, fixed the dates for sowing and reaping, voted upon the admission of new families into the village, and in general transacted