«Scores of free-tenants on a single manor make surrenders to the Abbey of Lorsch.» In the thickly peopled Romano-German lands on both sides of the Rhine, including the present Elsass on the one side, and the district between the Rhine and the Maine (the present Baden and Wirtemberg) on the other, so strong was the current in this direction that we find in the _Traditiones_ of the monasteries [p329] of '_Lorsch_' and '_Wizenburg_' scores of surrenders taking place sometimes in a single village. And these cases are of peculiar interest because _G. L. von Maurer_ relies almost solely upon them as the earliest examples available in support of his theory of the original German _mark_ and _free village community_. His _only_ early instances are taken from the Lorsch Cartulary.[492] He cites 107 surrenders to the Abbey of Lorsch in '_Hantscuhesheim_' alone,[493] and concludes that there must have been at least as many free holders resident there in earlier times. In _Loeheim_ there were eight surrenders; in other heims thirty-five, five, twenty-three, ten, forty, five, and so on. These must, he concludes, have formed part of originally free village communities on the German mark system.[494] Now these surrenders to the abbey go back to the reign of Pepin; and the question is, What were these freemen who made these surrenders? Were they indeed members of _German free village communities_? In the first place, they lived in a district which for many centuries had been a Roman province. The manners of the people had long been Romanised. Even across the Maine for generations the homesteads had been built in Roman fashion.[495] And it is significant that the fragments surrendered in this district, which since the time of Probus had become devoted to the vine culture, were mostly little _vineyards_; e.g. '_rem meam, hoc est vineam, i. in Hantscuhesheim_,'[496] and so [p330] on. These vineyards were often composed of so many '_scamelli_,' or little _scamni_--ridges or strips marked out by the Roman _Agrimensores_. All this is thoroughly Roman. What looks at first sight so much like a German free village community, was once a little Roman 'vicus' full of people, with their vineyards on the hills around it. They look like German settlers or 'free coloni' on the public domains, who had become appendant to the villa of the fiscal officer of the district, which had in fact by this time become to all intents and purposes a manor. A little further examination will confirm this view. «The _villas_ were _manors_.» Turning to the record of the earliest donation to the abbey, in A.D. 763,[497] we find a description of a whole villa or _heim_--'_Hoc est, villam nostram quæ dicitur Hagenheim, cum omni integritate sua, terris domibus ædificiis campis pratis vineis silvis aquis aquarumve decursibus farinariis litis libertis conlibertis mancipiis mobilibus et immobilibus, &c._'