Connecting these statements with the previous one, that sometimes land was assigned to _a number of settlers jointly_, and that sometimes settlers took possession, without centuriation, of so much land as they could cultivate, and transferring these same methods from Italy, where Flaccus observed them, to transalpine provinces, where larger teams were [p279] needful for ploughing, it would seem that we may rightly picture bodies of free settlers on the 'ager publicus' as frequently joining their yokes of oxen together to plough their allotments on the open-field system. And if this was done by retired veterans on public land, they were probably only following the common method adopted by the _coloni_ on the villas of the richer Roman landowners in the provinces. If they did so, they probably simply adopted the custom of the country in which they settled, and followed a method common not only to Gaul and Germany, but also to Europe and Asia.[399] «The method of centuriation.» Even in the case of the regular centuriation, there was an _opportunity_, apparently, for joint occupation, and probably often a necessity for joint ploughing. Hyginus, describing the mode of centuriation, speaks first of the two broad roads running north and south and east and west; and then he says the '_sortes_' were divided, and the names recorded in tens (_per decurias, i.e. per homines denos_), the subdivision among the ten being left till afterwards.[400] It does not follow, perhaps, that the subdivision was always made in regular squares. There may sometimes have been a common occupation and joint ploughing; but of this we know nothing. «The veterans a privileged class.» The retired veterans were a privileged class, and specially exempted from many public burdens;[401] but in other respects there is no reason to suppose that in their methods of settlement and agriculture, and [p280] in the size of their holdings proportioned to their single or double yokes, they differed from other free settlers or ancient original tenants on the _ager publicus_. We may add that, following the usual Roman custom, these settlers probably as a rule lived in towns and villages, and not on their farms. We may assume that, having single or double yokes of oxen and outfits of two kinds of seed, they were arable and not pasture farmers, with their homesteads in the village and their land in the fields around it--in some places under the three-field system, in others with a rectangular block of land on which they followed the three-course or other rotation of crops for themselves. Groups of settlers may therefore be regarded as sometimes forming something very much like a free village community upon the public land of the Empire, with no lord over it except the fiscal and judicial officers of the Emperor. V. THE SMALLER TENANTS ON THE 'AGER PUBLICUS' (_continued_)--THE LÆTI. «The _Læti_ a semi-servile class, like the Welsh _taeogs_.»