Now, if we could be sure that the tribal homestead was a permanent possession, and that the village of serfs around it had a single tribesman for its lord, the settlement would practically be to all intents and purposes a _heim_ or _manor_ with a village in serfdom upon it. It was evidently in a real sense the tribesman's separate possession, for, after speaking of blood relationships which bind the German tribesman's family and home most strongly together, Tacitus adds, 'Everyone's children are his heirs and successors [p341] without his making a will; and if there be no children, the grades of succession are brothers, paternal uncles, maternal uncles.'[518] But then this was also the case in Wales and Ireland. There was division among male heirs of the family land. And yet this family land was not a freehold permanent estate so long as a periodical redistribution of the tribe land might shift it over to someone else. «The embryo manor.» The embryo manor of the German tribesman, with its village of serfs upon it, might therefore, if the same practice prevailed, differ in three ways from the later manor. It might become the possession of a tribal household instead of a single lord; and also it possibly might, on a sudden redistribution of the tribal land, fall into the possession of another tribesman or tribal household, though perhaps this is not very likely often to have happened. Finally, it might become subdivided when the time came for the unity of the tribal household to be broken up as it was in Wales after the final redivision among second cousins. It must be remembered that land in the tribal stages of economic progress was the least stable and the least regarded of possessions. A tribesman's property consisted of his cattle and his serfs. These were his permanent family wealth, and he was rich or poor as he had more or less of them. So long as the tribe land was plentiful, he as the head of a tribal household took his proper share according to tribal rank; and so long as periodical redistributions took place, even when the tribal household finally was [p342] broken up, room would be found for the new tribal households on the tribal land. But when at last the limits of the land became too narrow for the tribe, a portion of the tribesmen would swarm off to seek new homes in a new country. Frequent migrations were, therefore, at once the proofs of pressure of population and the safety-valve of the system. «Fresh settlements.»