the reader this, but picks out from its context a single word; alters it and translates it in his own way; and presenting the reader only with this one word, tries to make him believe that the deed proves the annual division and common ownership of land. When Maurer comes to deal with the barbarian invasions, he takes great pains to get together a number of quotations which will suggest the idea of a partition of land (pages 72 _seq._); but if we examine them, we see that there is absolutely nothing about a _yearly_ or _periodical_ division. He first quotes from Victor Vitensis, who tells us that Genseric, directly he was master of the province called Zeugitana, divided its soil amongst his soldiers “in hereditary lots.”[99] This is exactly the opposite of a yearly division of land, and, consequently, of common ownership. Next comes Procopius who writes that “the Ostrogoths divided amongst themselves the lands which had before been given to the Heruli.”[100] Here again we have to do with a division of land among private owners. Then Maurer, with a great profusion of quotations, points to the divisions of property that many scholars believe were effected between the Roman proprietors on the one hand and the Visigoths, Burgundians and Franks on the other. But this division, in any case, was neither yearly nor periodical. Each portion became, from the very first day, permanent and hereditary. It would be childish to maintain that a division of this kind was the sign of a system of common ownership. It shows on the contrary that the new comers knew nothing about community in land, and never practised it. And so we find that Maurer cannot, from all these nations, produce a single instance of a village holding its land in common or of an association of the mark. Not a single instance either from writers of the time, or from codes of law, or from charters, or from legal formulæ. And it is impossible to reply that this is simply a case of omission; for in these laws, charters and formulæ, we not only do not find common ownership, but we do find exactly the opposite; we find signs everywhere of private property, and of the rights of inheritance, donation and sale.