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CHAPTER IX.
THE MUTUAL GUARANTEE. MÆGBURH. TITHING.
HUNDRED.
The organization in Marks and in the Ga or Scir
was a territorial one, based upon the natural con-
formation 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 indivi-
dual 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 princi-
pally 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
CH. rx∙]
THE TITHING AND HUNDRED.
229
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 pro-
vince. Perhaps also the exigencies of military dis-
cipline may gradually have rendered a more com-
plicated method of enrolment necessary, by means
of which companies and regiments might be kept
upon a permanent footing, and called into imme-
diate action when occasion demanded their ser-
vices ; while, at the same time, due provision was
made for the tilling the lands of those whose per-
sonal exertions were required in defence of the
public weal1.
There were two forms in which these various
objects might be attained ; these were, subordinate
organizations of men, not excessive in number, or
too widely dispersed, and founded either upon the
bond of blood or the ties of family, including that
of adoption, or merely upon an arbitrary numerical
definition. Each of these plans had advantages as
well as defects : the family bond alone did not se-
cure a sufficient territorial unity, although in prac-
tice it had at first considerable influence upon the
location of individual households ; moreover it gave
rise to an inequality continually on the increase,
and necessarily threatening to the independence of
the free men. On the other hand, any merely arbi-
trary, numerical classification would have excluded
1 For the Frankish custom see the Capitulary of the year 807.
Pertz, hi, 149. and Donniges, Deut. Staatsr. pp. 92, 93.