Again, Professor Lamprecht says (p. 48), that “the meadows were common;” although nothing of the kind is mentioned in the Salic law or in any other document. More than that, if it is a fact that the meadows were common according to the Salic law, how is it that only once in the Salic law is any reference made to meadows, and then only to punish with the enormously heavy fine of 1500 denarii the person who takes a cartload of hay from another man’s field (tit. xxvii., sections 10 and 11)? Professor Lamprecht also maintains that mills were common, although the law only mentions mills belonging to private owners.[196] He fastens on authorities which are absolutely opposed to his theory, and then interprets them according to his liking. If, for instance, he sees that the Salic law punishes severely “anyone who ploughs or sows the field of another without the permission of the owner, _extra consilium domini_,” he maintains that this regulation is in his eyes an indication of community in land. If he sees in another place that a man who is unable to pay a fine must swear “that he possesses nothing upon the earth or under the earth;” this is so much proof that land is not an object of private ownership. The word _facultas_ occurs frequently in documents of this period, and it always signifies a man’s entire property, real and personal without distinction;[197] but, as the theory requires that real property should not be too prominent in Salic law, Professor Lamprecht supposes that the word applies only to personal property. Such is the character of the method he follows. By the aid of such so-called scholarship everything is to be traced back to a primitive community. Although the Frank documents of the Merovingian and Carlovingian periods make no mention of such a community, although they show exactly the opposite; the whole rural organisation, the entire social life must be the outgrowth of this community of the _mark_. “The _mark_ is the foundation, _substratum_, of everything” (p. 282). An infallible rule is supposed to have been found; and the whole history of the Middle Ages, willy nilly, must be made to fit into it. [54] _Geschichte der Markverfassung_, 1856. The same theory has been reproduced with slight differences, and sometimes fresh exaggerations by Waitz, _Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte_, 3 edit., I., pp. 125-131; Sohm, _Reichs- und Gerichtsverfassung_, pp. 117, 209-210. [55] Cæsar, vi., 22. [56] The expedition upon the right bank of the Rhine lasted only 18 days. [57] _Neque quisquam agri modum certum aut fines habet proprios; sed magistratus ac principes in annos singulos gentibus cognationibusque hominum qui una coierunt, quantum et quo loco visum est, agri attribuunt, atque anno post alio transire cogunt._