It must be granted that there is little direct evidence prior to the 9th century in disproof of the free community; but all the indirect evidence seems to tell against it. Gibbon long ago pointed out that the grant by the King of the South Saxons to St. Wilfrid, in the year 680, of the peninsula of Selsey (described as “the land of 87 families”), with the persons and property of all its inhabitants, showed that there, at any rate, there was a dependent population; especially as Bede goes on to tell us that among these inhabitants there were 250 slaves. And there are two still more considerable pieces of evidence to which due attention has hardly been given. The one is that the great majority of the early grants of land, beginning as early as 674, expressly transfer with the soil the cultivators upon it, and speak of them by precisely the same terms, _cassati_ and _manentes_, as were in contemporary use on the Continent to designate prædial serfs.[4] The other is that, as in the rest of Western Europe the whole country was divided into _villæ_, each _villa_ being a domain belonging to one or more proprietors, and cultivated by more or less servile tenants,[5] so in Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_, written in 731, the ordinary local division is also _villa_, often specifically described as _villa regia_ or _villa comitis_. He does indeed use _vicus_ or _viculus_ a dozen times; but in three of these cases the word _regis_ or _regius_ is added, and in two the term _villa_ is also used in the same chapter for the same place.[6] These five examples, it may further be noticed, occur in a narrative of the events of the middle of the seventh century,--a period near enough to Bede’s own time for his evidence to be valuable, and yet within a century and a half after the conquest of the districts in question. The absence, however, of direct evidence in proof of the original free community in England, and the presence of much indirect evidence in its disproof, have hitherto been supposed to be counterbalanced by the well-ascertained existence of the mark among our German kinsfolk, and by the results of “the comparative method,” especially as applied to India. Let us take the _markgenossenschaft_ first. It is a little difficult to discover the exact relation between Kemble and Maurer; but the obvious supposition is that it was from Maurer that Kemble derived his main idea; and it has usually been supposed that however Kemble may have exaggerated the action of the mark in England, in Germany it could be traced with unhesitating certainty. This is what, to Englishmen, gives especial interest to the essay of M. Fustel de Coulanges translated in the present volume.