The organization in Marks and in the Gá or Scír was a territorial one, based upon the natural conformation of the country, common possession of the soil and usufruct of its produce. It has been already said that both of these divisions had their separate courts of justice or parliaments, their judges and executive officers. But some further machinery was required to secure the public peace, to provide for the exercise of what, in modern society, we call the police, and to ensure the rights of the individual markman, in respect to other markmen, as well as his conformity to the general law. A corporate existence was necessary, which should embrace a more detailed system of relations than was to be found either in the Mark or in the Shiremoot. Strictly speaking, the former of these was principally busied with the questions which arose out of its own peculiar nature, that is, with offences against the integrity of the frontier, the forest, the rights of common in the pastures and meadows, and other delinquencies of a public character. On the other hand, the Shiremoot, though it must have taken cognizance of disputed questions between several Marks, and may, even from the first, have exercised some description of appellate jurisdiction, must naturally have considered the higher and more general attributes of legislation and foreign policy, the national rather than municipal administration, as belonging to its peculiar and appropriate province. Perhaps also the exigencies of military discipline may gradually have rendered a more complicated method of enrolment necessary, by means of which companies and regiments might be kept upon a permanent footing, and called into immediate action when occasion demanded their services; while, at the same time, due provision was made for the tilling the lands of those whose personal exertions were required in defence of the public weal[433]. ----- Footnote 433: For the Frankish custom see the Capitulary of the year 807. Pertz, iii. 149, and Dönniges, Deut. Staatsr. pp. 92, 93. -----