The laws of Ethelbert, taken in connexion with the subsequent laws of Ine, and the later actual [p179] instances of Saxon manors which have been examined, form a connected chain, and bring back the links of the evidence of the manorial character of Saxon estates to the very century in which the greater part of the West Saxon conquests took place. The existence of earl's and king's and men's _hams_ and _tuns_ in the year of the codification of the Kentish laws, A.D. 602 or thereabouts, means their existence as a manorial type of estate in the sixth century; and with the exception of the southern districts, the West Saxon conquests were not made till late in the sixth century. Surely there is too short an interval left unaccounted for to allow of great economic changes--to admit of the degeneracy of an original free village community if a widely spread institution, into a community in serfdom. So that the evidence strongly points to the _hams_ and _tuns_ having been manorial in their type from the first conquest. In other words, so far as this evidence goes, the Saxons seem either to have introduced the manorial system into England themselves, founding _hams_ and _tuns_ on the manorial type, or to have found them already existing on their arrival in Britain. There seems no room for the theory that the Saxons introduced everywhere free village communities on the system of the German 'mark,' which afterwards sank into serfdom under manorial lords. «The tribal system must be investigated.» But before we can be in a position to understand what probably happened we must turn our attention to those portions of Britain _which were not manorial_, and where village communities did not generally exist. They form an integral part of our present England, and English economic history has to do with the [p180] economic growth of the whole people. It cannot, therefore, confine itself to facts relating to one element only of the nation, and to one set of influences, merely because they became in the long run the paramount and overruling ones. And, moreover, the history of the manorial system itself cannot be properly understood without an understanding also of the parallel, and perhaps older, _tribal system_, which in the course of many centuries it was destined in some districts to overrule and supplant; in others, after centuries of effort, to fail in supplanting. FOOTNOTES: [153] '--_villani uniuscujusque villæ._ Deinde quomodo vocatur _mansio_' (f. 497). [154] _Liber de Hyda_, p. 63. [155] _Id._ p. 68. [156] _Id._ p. 72. [157] Luke xv. 16. [158] See _Ancient Laws and Institutes of England_, Thorpe, p. 185. This document was the subject of a special treatise by Dr. Heinrich Leo, Halle, 1842. [159] _The Cronykil of Scotland_, B. VI. c. xviii. [160] Matt. viii. 9. [161] _Ines Domas_, s. 51. Thorpe, p. 58. [162] _Id._ s. 63. Thorpe, p. 62. [163] _Id._ s. 63–6. Thorpe, pp. 62–3. [164] Matt. xxi. 33. [165] Boethius, c. xvii.