which some signs of community in land may possibly be seen. No avowal of this kind was, however, made by Maurer; his followers in Germany and France have been equally silent. All of them calmly appeal to the _Traditiones_, as if these fifteen ponderous volumes were not in themselves an overwhelming refutation of their theory. We must go further. Are the eighteen or twenty deeds referred to by Maurer given correctly? Do they really mean what our author wishes them to mean? Observe that he never quotes more than a single line, sometimes only one or two words. We must go to the documents themselves and verify them.[108] He first of all quotes, on page 47, a deed from the Lorsch collection. It is a charter of 773, by which Charles the Great grants to that monastery in perpetuity, the villa of Hephenheim, including lands, houses, slaves, vineyards, forests, fields, meadows, pasture, water and streams, with all its appurtenances and dependances, its boundaries and its marks, _cum terminis et marchis suis_.[109] Here is the mark, says Maurer. Yes, but not the mark of the village community. It is precisely the opposite, the march or boundary of a private property. We have here to do with a villa, a domain which has been the private property of the king and is now becoming the property of a convent. There is not a thought here of common ownership, or of a common mark, or of a village association. There is not even a village. It is a domain, cultivated, says the charter, by slaves. _Cum terminis et marchis suis_ are both words meaning the boundaries of the domain; and in a repetition of this kind there is nothing surprising. The _marca_ is precisely the same as the _terminus_. We saw above, in the Bavarian law, _terminus id est marca_. In the same way a charter of Childeric II. describes the boundary-line of a domain as _fines et marchas_.[110] We must not suppose that these _marchae_ were a stretch of land separate from the domain. The expression _dono villam ... cum marchis_ will astonish no one who is familiar with documents of this class. Any one who has any acquaintance with them knows that it was the custom in deeds of gift, or sale of a domain, to add, “with its boundaries.” Charters written in Gaul have the phrase, _cum omni termino suo_; in Germany, _cum omni marca sua_ or _cum marcis suis_.[111] In a large number of our documents _marca_ is used in this sense alone, as, for instance, in the _Codex Fuldensis_, No. 21, a deed of 760, in which a certain person makes a gift of a villa _cum marcas et fines_.