Passing now specially to the tenants on the 'Agri Decumates' and other tithe lands north of the Alps, and asking what were their rules of succession and methods of husbandry, perhaps sufficient stress has not always been laid upon the elasticity with which Roman provincial management adopted local customs and adapted itself to the local circumstances of a widely extended empire. We know little of the methods and rules adopted in the management of the 'tithe lands,' but if the foregoing considerations be sound, it may be that but little change was needful to convert their tenants into serfs on a manorial estate. They may have had but little to gain or to lose, or even to alter in their habits, in exchanging the rule of the imperial fiscal officers for the lordship of the later manorial lord. «Management of tithe lands. Modern Eastern example.» It is much to be hoped that more light may ere long be thrown upon this obscure subject by students of provincial law and the barbarian codes. In the meantime it may be possible, perhaps--so slowly do things change in the East--that an actual modern example taken from thence of the customary mode of managing public tithe lands at the present moment in what was once a Roman province might be a better guide to a correct conception of what went on 1,500 years ago on the 'Agri Decumates' than we could easily get in any other way. «The Syrian code of fifth century.» The Roman province of Syria is peculiarly [p312] interesting, because the Roman code[460] applying to it in the fifth century happens to remain, and to afford interesting evidence of adaptation to local customs in a district unique in the advantage that its usages, little altered by the lapse of time, can be studied as well in the parables of the New Testament as on its actual fields to-day. «The 'Pflicht-theil' in Syria and in Bavaria of Roman origin.» Sir Henry S. Maine[461] has recently referred to the parable of the 'Prodigal Son' as illustrating the custom still followed in Turkey of sons taking their portions during the parent's lifetime, leaving one home-staying son to become the single successor to the remainder, including the family homestead and land. The Syrian code,[462] following Roman Law,[463] insisted upon three-twelfths of a man's property going to his children equally, and left him at liberty to dispose of the remaining nine-twelfths among them at his pleasure. But an _emancipated_ son had no claim to a share in the _three_-twelfths.[464] These local or Roman usages have an interesting connexion with the permission which, as we shall see in the next section, was given by the Bavarian code of the seventh century, to free possessors of land '_after they had made division with their sons_' to surrender their '_own portion_,' by way of commendation, to the Church.[465] [p313]