nd for life--a trick which the holy church remembered and freely
imitated during the ninth and tenth century, for the greater glory of
God. In the fifth century, however, about the year 475, Bishop Salvianus
of Marseilles still vehemently denounced such robbery and relates that
the methods of the Roman officials and great landlords became so
oppressive that many "Romans" fled to the districts occupied by the
barbarians and feared nothing so much as a return under Roman rule. That
poor parents frequently sold their children into slavery, is proved by a
law forbidding this practice.

In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the barbarians
appropriated two-thirds of the entire land and divided it among
themselves. The distribution was made by gentile rules. As the number of
the conquerors was relatively small, large tracts remained undivided in
the possession of the nation, the tribe or the gens. Every gens
distributed the land for cultivation and pastures to the individual
households by drawing lots. We do not know whether repeated divisions
took place at that time. At any rate, this practice was soon discarded
in the Roman provinces, and the individual lot became salable private
property, a so-called freehold (allodium). Forests and pastures remained
undivided for collective use. This use and the mode of cultivating the
divided land was regulated by tradition and the will of the community.
The longer the gens lived in its village, and the better Germans and
Romans became amalgamated in the course of time, the more did the
character of kinship lose ground before territorial bounds. The gens
disappeared in the mark commune, the members of which, however, still
exhibited traces of kinship. In the countries where mark communes were
still preserved--in the North of France, in England, Germany and
Scandinavia--the gentile constitution gradually merged into a local
constitution and thus acquired the capacity of being fitted into a
state. Nevertheless this local constitution retained some of the
primeval democratic character which distinguishes the whole gentile
order, and thus preserved a piece of gentilism even in its enforced
degeneration of later times. This left a weapon in the hands of the
oppressed, ready to be wielded by them even in the present time.

The rapid loss of the bonds of blood in the gens as a result of conquest
caused the degeneration of the tribal and national organs of gentilism.
We know