One of the most important documents instanced by Maurer is a deed of the year 1150, in which mention is made of a forest called _allmend_, “where the peasants often go and which is common to them.” To judge from this phrase, apart from its context, we might suppose that we have here to do with a mark, that is to say, with land owned in common by a group of cultivators. But if we read the whole document we find that it is a case where an entire villa belongs to three brothers “by inheritance from their ancestors;” that they are making a gift of it to a monastery,[147] and at the same time transferring their rights over a forest adjoining the domain. “This forest,” they say, “called in the vulgar tongue _allmend_, is frequented by the peasants, and is used in common by them and us.”[148] But these peasants are their tenants; though free in 1150, they had once been the _coloni_, serfs or _villani_ of the proprietor; and what proves this is that the authors of the deed from which we are quoting, add that one of their ancestors granted these men “civil rights” and a charter; and they take care to insert this charter in the deed so that it may be respected by the new owner.[149] Here, then, is an instance in which peasants have certain rights of use over a forest, but rights which are assuredly not derived from a time when these men were owners of the forest. Some generations before, the whole domain had belonged to a single owner and these people had been his servants; they enjoyed certain rights in the forest as tenants, and these were left to them when they became free men.[150]