The allusion to the division of the fields into strips, and to the unit of land measurement being the day's work of a pair of oxen, and, we may add, the use of the same unit of measurement throughout the Turkish Empire,[471] may at least prepare us to find [p316] indications of a somewhat similar system of cultivation on the tithe lands on the Danube and the Rhine when we come to examine their conditions under the early Alamannic and Bavarian laws. And, lastly, this Eastern illustration of the modern management of 'tithe lands' may help us to give due weight to the suggestion of Sir H. S. Maine[472] that not only on the 'ager publicus,' but even on the Roman provincial villa itself, in the organisation of the mostly barbarian and servile tenants, and of the husbandry, many features may well have been borrowed from ordinary and wide-spread customs of barbarian communities, thus partially explaining what must again and again strike us in this investigation, viz., the ease with which Roman and barbarian elements combined during the later Roman rule of the provinces and afterwards in producing a complex and joint result--the typical manorial estate. X. THE TRANSITION FROM THE ROMAN TO THE LATER MANORIAL SYSTEM. «Laws of the Alamanni, A.D. 622.» The Alamannic conquest of the province of _Germania Prima_, including what is now Elsass and the western part of the 'Agri Decumates,' may be described as almost a passive one. The population had long been partly German, and Roman provincial usages can hardly have been altogether supplanted in the fifth century. It was not till the Alamanni were themselves [p317] conquered by the Franks (who had in the meantime become nominally Christian) that their laws were codified. When this took place in the year 622 it was with special reference to the interests of the Church that the laws were framed, just as in the case of the first codification of Anglo-Saxon laws on King Ethelbert becoming a Christian. «Permission to surrender to the Church.» The very first provision of the Alamannic laws was a direct permission to any freeman, without hindrance from 'Dux' or 'Comes,' to surrender his property and himself to the Church by charter executed before six or seven witnesses; and it provided further that if he should surrender his land, to receive the usufruct of it back again during life as a benefice charged with a certain tribute or census, his heir should not dispute the surrender.[473] In the Bavarian laws of slightly later date there is a similar permission to any freeman, _from his own share, after he has made division with his sons_, to surrender to the Church _villas_, _lands_, _slaves_, or other property, to be received back as a _beneficium_ in the same way,[474] and neither 'rex,' 'dux,' nor 'any other person' is to prevent it. [p318]