There is one such story which belongs to English history. One of the most famous of these youngest-son stories is that of Childe Rowland, and Mr. Jacobs, on examining its incidents and details, suggests that "our story may have a certain amount of historic basis and give a record which history fails to give of the very earliest conflict of races in these isles."[440] Mr. Jacobs gives good grounds for this conclusion, and shows up a picture of earliest English history which is certainly not contained elsewhere, and we are able by this means to pass from that large group of youngest-son stories, which have brought with them living testimony of an ancient institution of our race in its oldest home, to the narrower but more direct example which comes to us from events which happened just at the dawn of history in our own land. It is not necessary to emphasise the importance of this service to history at the instance of tradition, for it will be obvious to every student that many a struggle must have remained unrecorded and many a hero must have died unnamed in the events which belong to the period of tribal conquest and settlement. And to have still with us the far-off echo of these events is no slight encouragement to an inquiry which has for its object the reconstruction of the conditions under which such events took place. This would be all the better understood if we could get a concrete case for illustration, and, fortunately, this is possible by turning to the evidence of India. "What we know of the manner in which the states of Upper India were founded," says Sir Alfred Lyall, "gives a very fair sample of the movements and changes of the primitive world. When the dominant Rajput families lost their dominion in the rich Gangetic plains one part of their clan seems to have remained in the conquered country, having submitted to the foreigner, cultivating in strong communities of villages and federations of villages and paying such land tax as the ruler could extract. Another part of the clan, probably the near kinsmen of the defeated chief, followed his family into exile, and helped him to carve out another, but a much poorer, dominion. Here the chief built himself a fort upon the hill; his clansmen slew or subdued the tribes they found in possession of the soil, and the lands were all parcelled off among the chief's kinsfolk, the indigenous proprietors being subjected to payment of a land tax, but not otherwise degraded. When the land grew too strait for the support of the chief's family or of the sept--that is, when there were no vacant allotments, a landless son of the chief would assemble a band, and set forth to make room for himself elsewhere."[441]