In the matter of early English land-holding Maitland put the individualist case with great cogency. While admitting co-operation he did not find decisive evidence of common ownership either in town or country. The village community was not a body that could declare the law of the tribe or nation. It had no court, no jurisdiction. If moots were held in it, these would be comparable rather to meetings of shareholders than to sessions of a tribunal. In short, the village landowners formed a group of men whose economic affairs were inextricably intermixed; but this was almost the only principle that made them a unit, unless and until the state began to use the township as its organ for the maintenance of the peace and the collection of the taxes. That is the reason why we read little of the township in our Anglo-Saxon dooms. Even in the German community there was a solid core of individualism! It is possible that Maitland overrated the "automatic" character of early agrarian life; that he argued too much from the silence of the dooms, that his principal tests were too predominantly legal; and that more may be said for the older theory than he was able at that time to discover in _Domesday Book and Beyond_. But the considerations which he submitted were substantial considerations, and in any picture which is drawn of the early state of land-holding in this country room will have to be made for a measure of individualism, if not equal to that which Maitland claimed, greater at least than the earlier theory had admitted. FOOTNOTES: [24] The leading characteristics of the system had been pointed out as early as 1821 by the Danish scholar, O. C. Olufsen, and received much further illustration from the labours of Georg Hanssen of Göttingen, whose papers [collected in 1880-4 under the title _Agrarhistorische Abhandlungen_] date back to 1835. VIII.