[547] The occasional instances in which the patronymic termination is added to the name of a tree or an animal, has led to the hasty conclusion that the Saxons were '_totemists_,' and believed themselves descended from trees and animals; _e.g._ that the _Buckings_ of _Bucks_ thought themselves descendants of the beech tree. The fact that _personal names_ were taken from trees and animals--that one person called himself '_the Beech_,' another '_the Wolf_'--quite disposes of this argument, for their households would call themselves '_Beechings_' and '_Wolfings_' in quite a natural course, without any dream of descent from the tree or the animal whose name their father or great-grandfather had borne. [548] The resemblance is equally apparent whether the comparison be made between names without further suffix or whether those with it are included. See the long list of patronymic names in England, Germany, and France in Taylor's _Words and Places_, App. B, pp. 496–513. [549] Taylor's _Words and Places_, pp. 131–4, and App. B, p. 491. [550] See the lists given in Taylor's _Words and Places_, Appendix B, pp. 496 _et seq._ Taylor says that there are 1,100 of the patronymic names in France, of which 250 are similar to those in England. See pp. 144 _et seq._ [551] Taken from _Traditiones Fuldensis_, Dronke, pp. 240–243. The above list includes all the names in Frisia with a patronymic and no other suffix. [552] Taken from the _Wirtembergische Urkundenbuch_. [553] _Chartularium Sithiense_, p. 18. [p368] CHAPTER X. _THE CONNEXION BETWEEN THE OPEN-FIELD SYSTEM AND SERFDOM OF ENGLAND AND OF THE ROMAN PROVINCES OF GERMANY AND GAUL._ I. THE OPEN-FIELD SYSTEM IN ENGLAND AND IN GERMANY COMPARED. We now return to the English manorial and open-field system, in order, taking it up where we left it, to trace its connexion with the similar Continental system, and to inquire in what districts the closest resemblances to it are to be found--whether in the un-Romanised north or in the southern districts so long included within the _limes_ of the Roman provinces. «Under the manorial system, the open-field system the shell of serfdom.» The earliest documentary evidence available on English ground left us in full possession of the Saxon manor with its village community of serfs upon it, inhabiting as its shell the open-field system in its most organised form, _i.e._ with its (generally) three fields, its furlongs, its acre or half-acre strips, its headlands, its yard-lands or bundles of normally thirty acres, scattered all over the fields, the yard-land representing the year's ploughing of a pair of oxen in the team of [p369] eight, and the acre strip the measure of a day's plough-work of the team. This was the system described in the '_Rectitudines_' of the tenth century, and the allusions to the 'gebur,' the 'yard-land,' the 'setene,' the 'gafol,' and the 'week-work' in the laws of Ine carried back the evidence presumably to the seventh century.