Observe, too, that there is absolutely no doubt as to the meaning of the language employed. Could language be clearer than that of the following passage taken from a deed of 770? “I, Wicbert, give to the church of St. Nazarius the farms (_mansi_), lands, fields, meadows and slaves that belong to me. All these I deliver to the church to be held for ever, with the right and power of holding, giving, exchanging, and doing with them as seems to it best.”[102] Or of a deed of 786: “I, daughter of Theodon, give to St. Nazarius all that I hold by inheritance in the places here mentioned; and everything that has been in my possession and ownership, I hand over into the possession and ownership of St. Nazarius.”[103] And again: “Whatever land belongs to me I give to the abbot and his successors to hold and possess it for ever;”[104] and yet again: “I, Wrachaire, give whatever land is mine in my own right for the abbot henceforward to hold in his own right, _jure proprio_.”[105] These expressions occur in thousands of documents. Often the donor or seller adds that he holds the land by inheritance, that he has received it from his father.[106] Another thing we must not fail to notice is that ownership is not limited to land under cultivation; it includes forest, pasture and streams,[107] as we find over and over again. And it is never a village community or mark which makes such a gift, but always a single individual. Such is the character of the records Maurer sets about using in order to prove the existence of community in land in the Middle Ages. It is evident that, taken as a whole, they are in direct contradiction to this theory; but what he does is to separate from the rest about twenty deeds, take his evidence from them, and ignore the existence of the rest. What can be said for a proceeding by which, merely for the sake of propping up a theory, certain isolated cases are picked out, and the great mass of evidence, which is in opposition to the theory, is passed over? At the very least, it would have been only fair to warn the reader that the deeds quoted belonged to an insignificant minority--eighteen or twenty out of about ten thousand. Readers have not always volumes of this kind at their elbow; and if they have, it does not occur to them to verify the references. If you present them with twenty quotations, they at once suppose that these are the only ones in existence. They ought to be told that there are ten thousand other deeds of the same character, written at the same time, drawn up according to the same forms. You should confess that these ten thousand deeds say exactly the opposite of the twenty you quote. You should not leave them in ignorance of the fact that these thousands of gifts, wills, sales or exchanges of land form an absolute proof of a system of private property. Only after pointing all this out, would it be right to tell them that there are perhaps eighteen or twenty deeds in