The emigrating tribesmen in their new home would form themselves into a new sept or tribe, take possession of fresh tracts of unoccupied land, and perhaps, if land were plentiful, wander about for a time from place to place as pasture for their cattle might tempt them. Then at last they would settle: each tribesman would select his site by plain, wood or stream, as it pleased him. He would erect his stake and wattle tribal house, and daub it over with clay[519] to keep out the weather. He would put up his rough outbuildings and fence in his corn and cattle yard. Round this tribal homestead the still rougher homesteads of his serfs, each with its yard around it, would soon form a straggling village, and the likeness to the embryo manor would once more appear. «The celebrated passage of Tacitus describing German agriculture.» Indeed, when we turn to the famous passage in which the German settlements and their internal economy are described, the words used by Tacitus seem in themselves to indicate that he had in his eye precisely this process which the example of the Welsh and Irish tribal systems has helped to make intelligible to us. Tracts of country (_agri_), he says, are '_taken possession of_' (_occupantur_) by a body of tribesmen (_ab universis_) who are apparently seeking new [p343] homes; and then the _agri_ are presently divided among them. This passage, so often and so variously construed and interpreted, is as follows:-- 'Agri pro numero cultorum ab universis vicis [or _in_ or _per vices_][520] occupantur, quos mox inter se secundum dignationem partiuntur: facilitatem partiendi camporum spatia præstant. 'Arva per annos mutant, et superest ager: nec enim cum ubertate et amplitudine soli labore contendunt, ut pomaria conserant et prata separent et hortos rigent: sola terræ seges imperatur.'[521] It is unfortunate that the first few lines of this passage are made ambiguous by an error in the texts. If the true reading be, as many modern German critics now hold, '_ab universis vicis_'--by all the _vici_ together, or by the whole community in _vici_--there still must remain the doubt whether the word _vicus_ should not be considered rather as the equivalent of the Welsh _trev_ than of the modern _village_. The Welsh 'trev' was, as we have seen, a subordinate cluster of scattered households. Tacitus himself probably uses the word in this sense in the passage where he describes the choice of the chiefs, or head men (_principes_) 'qui jura per pagos _vicos_que reddunt.'[522] The _vicus_ is here evidently a smaller tribal subdivision of the _pagus_, just as the Welsh _trev_ was of the '_cymwd_,' and not necessarily a village in the modern sense.[523] [p344] «Fresh _agri_ taken possession of and divided under tribal rules.»