He says (p. 46) that the mark appears in Frank law as an area of land held in common; but he does not give a single quotation in which the mark means an area of common land, and it is certain he could not produce one. He tells us that he has seen the _marca_ in Ripuarian law, but he neglects to say that this _marca_ is the boundary of a private estate, and therefore exactly the opposite of common land.[184] He also mentions that the word occurs again in an edict of Chilperic, and he omits to add that the word _marca_ was only introduced into this edict by a conjecture of Professor Sohm’s, and that in any case it is impossible to give it in this place the meaning of common land.[185] “The Frank village,” he says, “was a portion of the mark, and the mark was the common property of all its inhabitants; everything was in common--arable land, meadows, forests.”[186] You look at the foot of the page for the authorities on which this statement is based, and you find a reference to a document of 786; you turn to this; it is in Beyer, (_Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte des Mittelrheins_, vol. i. p. 19), and you see that it has nothing whatever to do with the mark, that not even the word is to be found in it, and that the document merely relates to a “villa Sentiacus.” The absence of the term _mark_, and of all other like terms, from the Franconian laws, does not trouble our author. He discovers there the word _vicini_. To every one else this word signifies _neighbours_; and it is easy to see that every system of law must pay some slight attention to the mutual relations of persons who live near together. In the eyes of Dr. Lamprecht, however, _vicini_ stands for _associates_; neighbourhood and common mark are with him one and the same thing. You have neighbours; therefore you form with them part of an association; therefore the land is common to you and to them: such is his process of reasoning. It would greatly surprise one of our peasants of to-day; they are by no means accustomed to identify neighbourhood and corporate union. But a scholar with a theory does not stoop to such small considerations as this. Perhaps, however, some document has come down to us from the Frank period, which would suggest that the men of that time saw a connection between the two things? Not at all; not a single clause in a law, not a charter, not a document of any kind suggests that the idea of association was connected with that of neighbourhood. The _vicini_ of the Salic law are neighbours in the ordinary sense of the word. But Dr. Lamprecht has a peculiar method of interpreting authorities. There is a certain Merovingian capitulary which runs as follows: “If a man has been killed between two neighbouring _villae_, without its being known who is the murderer, the count must proceed to the place, call together the neighbours (that is to say, the inhabitants of the two neighbouring _villae_) to the sound of the