The master group is involved completely in the issue of this fight for dominion. In extreme cases, it may be completely exterminated, as were the local nobility of the Germanic tribes in the Frankish Empire. Nearly as bad, if not worse, is the prospect of being thrust into the group of the serfs. Sometimes a well-timed treaty of peace preserves their social position as master groups of subordinate rank: e. g., the Saxon nobility in Norman England, or the Suppans in German territory taken from the Slavs. In other cases, where the forces are about equal, the two groups amalgamate into one master group with equal rights, which forms a nobility whose members intermarry. This, for instance, was the situation in the Slavic Territories, where isolated Wendish chieftains were treated as the equals of the Germans, or in mediæval Rome, in the case of prominent families from the Alban Hills and Tuscany. In this new “primitive feudal state of higher grade,” as we shall call it, the ruling group may, therefore, disintegrate into a number of more or less powerful and privileged strata. The organization may show many varieties because of the well-known fact, that often the master group separates into two subordinated economic and social layers, developed as we saw them in the herdsmen stage: the owners of large herds and of many slaves, and the ordinary freemen. Possibly the less complete differentiation into social ranks in the states created by huntsmen in the new world, is to be assigned to the circumstance that in the absence of herds, the concomitants of that form of ownership, and the original separation into classes, were not introduced into the state. We shall, later, see what force was exerted on the political and economic development of states in the old world by the differences in rank and property of the two strata of rulers. Similarly, as in the case of the ruling group, a corresponding process of differentiation divides the subject group in the “primitive feudal state of a higher grade” into various strata more or less despised and compelled to render service. It is only necessary to recall the very marked difference in the social and jural position occupied by the peasantry in the Doric States, Lacedæmon and Crete, and among the Thessalians, where the perioiki had clear rights of possession and fairly well protected political rights, while the helots, in the latter case the _penestai_, were almost unprotected in life and property. Among the old Saxons also we find a class, the liti, intermediate between the common freemen and the serfs.[52] These examples could be multiplied; apparently they are caused by the same tendencies that brought about the differentiation among the nobility mentioned above. When two primitive feudal states amalgamate, their social layers stratify in a variety of ways, which to a certain extent are comparable to the combinations resulting from mixing together two packs of cards.