Maurer pays no attention to all these facts; he suppresses them, and in their stead conjures up a picture of mark associates. His theory once set up, he wrests the meaning of documents so that they shall agree with it. Seeing, for instance, in the laws of the Burgundians that the King Gondebaut commands “all his subjects” to observe a law, _universitatem convenit observare_, he believes that the word _universitas_ here relates to a village community;[173] and it does not occur to him that this is the usual formula by which the king addresses the whole body of his people. If he sees in the laws of the Visigoths that when any one wishes to change or restore the boundaries of a property, he must do it publicly, in the presence of neighbours, this natural custom becomes in his eyes a right of joint ownership possessed by the neighbours over the land in question.[174] Because some forests are common to several owners, he concludes that all forests are common to all. He maintains that the right of chase belonged to all; and when you examine the authorities from which he draws this conclusion, you discover that he quotes only two, and that these, on the contrary, severely punish the man who has stolen game.[175] Wherever he turns, he sees the mark. If the King Childebert speaks of the _centena_, the _centena_ must be the _mark_.[176] The duty of furnishing the king’s agents with a lodging when they are travelling falls on the _mark_.[177] If later on you see a church in every village, it is because, in times even earlier than Christianity, “the association of the mark was united by religious bonds;” and in proof of this he quotes a document of the year 1270 after Christ![178] The “associates of the mark,” he says again, “are bound to support one another” (page 161), and the only reference he gives is to the laws of the Alamanni; you turn to the place indicated, and all you see there is that two men have a quarrel, that one of them kills the other, and that the friends of the victim pursue the murderer.[179] What connection has this with an association of the mark? The village, according to him, formed a free self-governing body, under its own head; and he then instances the _comes loci_ of the laws of the Burgundians,[180] though it is certain that the _comes_, far from being a village chief, was the royal agent who administered a _civitas_. He does not fail to seize upon the _tunginus_ as a chief elected by the villagers; which, again, is pure imagination. He even discovers in a formula of Marculf a _senior communiæ_, “a head of the rural community;” but the passage in Marculf has a totally different meaning. The document in question is a letter written in the name of a certain city begging the king to appoint a bishop, and the expression _seniori communi_ is in the heading, amongst the titles given to the king himself. It is a strange mistake to suppose it referred to the principal man of a village