ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...

Also derived from the gentile organization is the obligation to inherit the enmities as well as the friendships of the father or the relatives; likewise the Wergeld, the fine for idling or injuring, in place of blood revenge.

The Wergeld, which only a generation ago was regarded as a specifically German institution, has now been shown to be general among hundreds of peoples as a milder form of the blood revenge originating out of the gentile organization.

We find it, for example, among the American Indians, who also regard hospitality as an obligation.

Tacitus’ description of hospitality as practiced among the Germans (Germania, Ch. XXI) is identical almost to the details with that given by Morgan of his Indians.

The endless, burning controversy as to whether the Germans of Tacitus’ time had already definitely divided the land or not, and how the relevant passages are to be interpreted, now belongs to the past.

No more words need be wasted in this dispute, since it has been established that among almost all peoples the cultivated land was tilled collectively by the gens, and later by communistic household communities such as were still found by Caesar among the Suevi, and that after this stage the land was allotted to individual families with periodical repartitions, which are shown to have survived as a local custom in Germany down to our day.

If in the one hundred and fifty years between Caesar and Tacitus the Germans had changed from the collective cultivation of the land expressly attributed by Caesar to the Suevi (they had no divided or private fields whatever, he says) to individual cultivation with annual repartition of the land, that is surely progress enough.

The transition from that stage to complete private property in land during such a short period and without any outside interference is a sheer impossibility.

What I read in Tacitus is simply what he says in his own dry words: they change (or divide afresh) the cultivated land every year, and there is enough common land left over.

It is the stage of agriculture and property relations in regard to the land which exactly corresponds to the gentile constitution of the Germans at that time.

I leave the preceding paragraph unchanged as it stood in the former editions.

Meanwhile the question has taken another turn.

Since Kovalevsky has shown (cf. pages 51-52) that the patriarchal household community was a very common, if not universal, intermediate form between the matriarchal communistic family and the modern isolated family, it is no longer a question of whether property in land is communal or private, which was the point at issue between Maurer and Waitz, but a question of the form of the communal property.

There is no doubt at all that the Suevi in Caesar's time not only owned the land in common, but also cultivated it in common for the common benefit.

Whether the economic unit was the gens or the household community or a communistic kinship group intermediate between the two; or whether all three groups occurred according to the conditions of the soil – these questions will be in dispute for a long time to come.

Kovalevsky maintains, however, that the conditions described by Tacitus presuppose the existence, not of the mark or village community, but of the household community and that the village community only develops out of the latter much later, as a result of the increase in population.

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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...

According to this view, the settlements of the Germans in the territory of which they were already in possession at the time of the Romans, and also in the territory which they later took from the Romans, were not composed of villages but of large household communities, which included several generations, cultivated an amount of land proportionate to the number of their members, and had common use with their neighbors of the surrounding waste.

The passage in Tacitus about changing the cultivated land would then have to be taken in an agronomic sense: the community cultivated a different piece of land every year, and allowed the land cultivated the previous year to lie fallow or run completely to waste; the population being scanty, there was always enough waste left over to make any disputes about land unnecessary.

Only in the course of centuries, when the number of members in the household communities had increased so much that a common economy was no longer possible under the existing conditions of production did the communities dissolve.

The arable and meadow lands which had hitherto been common were divided in the manner familiar to us, first temporarily and then permanently, among the single households which were now coming into being, while forest, pasture land, and water remained common.

In the case of Russia this development seems to be a proved historical fact.

With regard to Germany, and, secondarily, the other Germanic countries, it cannot be denied that in many ways this view provides a better explanation of the sources and an easier solution to difficulties than that held hitherto, which takes the village community back to the time of Tacitus.

On the whole, the oldest documents, such as the Codex Laureshamensis, can be explained much better in terms of the household community than of the village community.

On the other hand, this view raises new difficulties and new questions, which have still to be solved.

They can only be settled by new investigations; but I cannot deny that in the case also of Germany, Scandinavia and England there is very great probability in favor of the intermediate form of the household community.

While in Caesar’s time the Germans had only just taken up or were still looking for settled abodes, in Tacitus’ time they already had a full century of settled life behind them; correspondingly, the progress in the production of the necessities of life is unmistakable.

They live in log-houses; their clothing is still very much that of primitive people of the forests: coarse woolen mantles, skins; for women and notable people underclothing of linen.

Their food is milk, meat, wild fruits, and, as Pliny adds, oatmeal porridge (still the Celtic national food in Ireland and Scotland).

Their wealth consists in cattle and horses, but of inferior breed; the cows are small, poor in build and without horns; the horses are ponies, with very little speed.

Money was used rarely and in small amounts; it was exclusively Roman.

They did not work gold or silver, nor did they value it.

Iron was rare, and, at least, among the tribes on the Rhine and the Danube, seems to have been almost entirely imported, not mined.

Runic writing (imitated from the Greek or Latin letters) was a purely secret form of writing, used only for religious magic.

Human sacrifices were still offered.

In short, we here see a people which had just raised itself from the middle to the upper stage of barbarism.

But whereas the tribes living immediately on the Roman frontiers were hindered in the development of an independent metal and textile industry by the facility with which Roman products could be imported, such industry undoubtedly did develop in the northeast, on the Baltic.

The fragments of weapons found in the Schleswig marshes – long iron sword, coat of mail, silver helmet, and so forth, together with Roman coins of the end of the second century – and the German metal objects distributed by the migrations, show quite a pronounced character of their own, even when they derive from an originally Roman model.

Emigration into the civilized Roman world put an end to this native industry everywhere except in England.

With what uniformity this industry arose and developed, can be seen, for example, in the bronze brooches; those found in Burgundy, Rumania and on the Sea of Azov might have come out of the same workshop as those found in England and Sweden, and are just as certainly of Germanic origin.

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thelivyjr
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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...

The constitution also corresponds to the upper stage of barbarism.

According to Tacitus, there was generally a council of chiefs (principes), which decided minor matters, but prepared more important questions for decision by the assembly of the people; at the lower stage of barbarism, so far as we have knowledge of it, as among the Americans, this assembly of the people still comprises only the members of the gens, not yet of the tribe or of the confederacy of tribes.

The chiefs (principes) are still sharply distinguished from the military leaders (duces) just as they are among the Iroquois; they already subsist partially on gifts of cattle, corn, etc., from the members of the tribe; as in America, they are generally elected from the same family.

The transition to father-right favored, as in Greece and Rome, the gradual transformation of election into hereditary succession, and hence the rise of a noble family in each gens.

This old so-called tribal nobility disappeared for the most part during the migrations or soon afterwards.

The military leaders were chosen without regard to their descent, solely according to their ability.

They had little power and had to rely on the force of example.

Tacitus expressly states that the actual disciplinary authority in the army lay with the priests.

The real power was in the hands of the assembly of the people.

The king or the chief of the tribe presides; the people decide: “No” by murmurs; “Yes” by acclamation and clash of weapons.

The assembly of the people is at the same time an assembly of justice; here complaints are brought forward and decided and sentences of death passed, the only capital crimes being cowardice, treason against the people, and unnatural lust.

Also in the gentes and other subdivisions of the tribe all the members sit in judgment under the presidency of the chief, who, as in all the early German courts, can only have guided the proceedings and put questions; the actual verdict was always given among Germans everywhere by the whole community.

Confederacies of tribes had grown up since the time of Caesar; some of them already had kings; the supreme military commander was already aiming at the position of tyrant, as among the Greeks and Romans, and sometimes secured it.

But these fortunate usurpers were not by any means absolute rulers; they were, however, already beginning to break the fetters of the gentile constitution.

Whereas freed slaves usually occupied a subordinate position, since they could not belong to any gens, as favorites of the new kings they often won rank, riches and honors.

The same thing happened after the conquest of the Roman Empire by these military leaders, who now became kings of great countries.

Among the Franks, slaves and freedmen of the king played a leading part first at the court and then in the state; the new nobility was to a great extent descended from them.

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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, concluded ...

One institution particularly favored the rise of kingship: the retinues.

We have already seen among the American Indians how, side by side with the gentile constitution, private associations were formed to carry on wars independently.

Among the Germans, these private associations had already become permanent.

A military leader who had made himself a name gathered around him a band of young men eager for booty, whom he pledged to personal loyalty, giving the same pledge to them.

The leader provided their keep, gave them gifts, and organized them on a hierarchic basis; a bodyguard and a standing troop for smaller expeditions and a regular corps of officers for operations on a larger scale.

Weak as these retinues must have been, and as we in fact find them to be later – for example, under Odoacer in Italy – they were nevertheless the beginnings of the decay of the old freedom of the people and showed themselves to be such during and after the migrations.

For in the first place they favored the rise of monarchic power.

In the second place, as Tacitus already notes, they could only be kept together by continual wars and plundering expeditions.

Plunder became an end in itself.

If the leader of the retinue found nothing to do in the neighborhood, he set out with his men to other peoples where there was war and the prospect of booty.

The German mercenaries who fought in great numbers under the Roman standard even against Germans were partly mobilized through these retinues.

They already represent the first form of the system of Landsknechte, the shame and curse of the Germans.

When the Roman Empire had been conquered, these retinues of the kings formed the second main stock, after the unfree and the Roman courtiers, from which the later nobility was drawn.

In general, then, the constitution of those German tribes which had combined into peoples was the same as had developed among the Greeks of the Heroic Age and the Romans of the so-called time of the kings: assembly of the people, council of the chiefs of the gentes, military leader, who is already striving for real monarchic power.

It was the highest form of constitution which the gentile order could achieve; it was the model constitution of the upper stage of barbarism.

If society passed beyond the limits within which this constitution was adequate, that meant the end of the gentile order; it was broken up and the state took its place.


Footnotes

[1] During a few days spent in Ireland, I realized afresh to what an extent the country people still live in the conceptions of the gentile period. The landed proprietor, whose tenant the farmer is, is still regarded by the latter as a kind of chief of the clan, whose duty it is to manage the land in the interests of all, while the farmer pays tribute in the form of rent, but has a claim upon him for assistance in times of necessity. Similarly, everyone who is well off is considered under an obligation to assist his poorer neighbors when they fall on hard times. Such help is not charity; it is what the poorer member of the clan is entitled to receive from the wealthier member or the chief. One can understand the complaints of the political economists and jurists about the impossibility of making the Irish peasant grasp the idea of modern bourgeois property; the Irishman simply cannot get it into his head that there can be property with rights but no duties. But one can also understand that when Irishmen with these naive gentile conceptions suddenly find themselves in one of the big English or American towns among a population with completely different ideas of morality and justice, they easily become completely confused about both morality and justice and lose all their bearings, with the result that masses of them become demoralized. (Note to the Fourth Edition.)

[2] The peculiar closeness of the bond between maternal uncle and nephew, which derives from the time of mother-right and is found among many peoples, is only recognized by the Greeks in their mythology of the heroic age. According to Diodorus, IV, 34, Meleager slays the sons of Thestius, the brothers of his mother Althma. She regards this deed as such an inexpiable crime that she curses the murderer, her own son, and prays for his death. “The gods heard her wishes,” the story says, “and put an end to Meleager’s life.” Also according to Diodorus (IV, 44), the Argonauts land in Thrace under Heracles and there find that Phincus, at the instigation of his new wife, is shamefully ill-treating the two sons born to him by his former wife, the Boread Cleopatra, whom he has put away. But among the Argonauts there are also Boreads, brothers of Cleopatra, therefore maternal uncles of the maltreated boys. They at once take up their nephews’ cause, free them, and kill their guards.

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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VIII. The Formation of the State among Germans

According to Tacitus, the Germans were a very numerous people.

Caesar gives us an approximate idea of the strength of the separate German peoples; he places the number of the Usipetans and the Tencterans who appeared on the left bank of the Rhine at 180,000, women and children included.

That is about 100,000 to one people, [1] already considerably more than, for instance, the total number of the Iroquois in their prime, when, no more than 20,000 strong, they were the terror of the whole country from the Great Lakes to the Ohio and the Potomac.

On the map, if we try to group the better known peoples settled near the Rhine according to the evidence of the reports, a single people occupies the space of a Prussian government district that is, about 10,000 square kilometers or 182 geographical square miles. [About 4,000 square miles – Ed.]

Now, the Germania Magna of the Romans, which reached as far as the Vistula, had an area of 500,000 square kilometers in round figures.

Reckoning the average number of each people at 100,000, the total population of Germania Magna would work out at 5,000,000 - a considerable figure for a barbarian group of peoples, but, compared with our conditions ten persons to the square kilometer, or about 550 to the geographical square mile - extremely low.

But that by no means exhausts the number of the Germans then living.

We know that all along the Carpathians and down to the south of the Danube there were German peoples descended from Gothic tribes, such as the Bastarnians, Peucinians and others, who were so numerous that Pliny classes them together as the fifth main tribe of the Germans.

As early as 180 B.C. they make their appearance as mercenaries in the service of the Macedonian King Perseus, and in the first years of Augustus, still advancing, they almost reached Adrianople.

If we estimate these at only 1,000,000, the probable total number of the Germans at the beginning of our era must have been at least 6,000,000.

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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VIII. The Formation of the State among Germans, continued ...

After permanent settlements had been founded in Germany, the population must have grown with increasing rapidity; the advances in industry we mentioned are in themselves proof of this.

The objects found in the Schleswig marshes date from the third century, according to the Roman coins discovered with them.

At this time, therefore, there was already a developed metal and textile industry on the Baltic, brisk traffic with the Roman Empire and a certain degree of luxury among the more wealthy – all signs of denser population.

But also at this time begins the general attack by the Germans along the whole line of the Rhine, the Roman wall and the Danube, from the North Sea to the Black Sea – direct proof of the continual growth and outward thrust of the population.

For three centuries the fight went on, during which the whole main body of the Gothic peoples (with the exception of the Scandinavian Goths and the Burgundians) thrust south-east, forming the left wing on the long front of attack, while in the center the High Germans (Hermionians) pushed forward down the upper Danube, and on the right wing the Ischovonians, now called Franks, advanced along the Rhine; the Ingoevonians carried out the conquest of Britain.

By the end of the fifth century an exhausted and bleeding Roman Empire lay helpless before the invading Germans.

In earlier chapters we were standing at the cradle of ancient Greek and Roman civilization.

Now we stand at its grave.

Rome had driven the leveling plane of its world rule over all the countries of the Mediterranean basin, and that for centuries.

Except when Greek offered resistance, all natural languages had been forced to yield to a debased Latin; there were no more national differences, no more Gauls, Iberians, Ligurians, Noricans; all had become Romans.

Roman administration and Roman law had everywhere broken up the old kinship groups, and with them the last vestige of local and national independence.

The half-baked culture of Rome provided no substitute; it expressed no nationality, only the lack of nationality.

The elements of new nations were present everywhere; the Latin dialects of the various provinces were becoming increasingly differentiated; the natural boundaries which once had made Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa independent territories, were still there and still made themselves felt.

But the strength was not there to fuse these elements into new nations; there was no longer a sign anywhere of capacity for development, or power of resistance, to say nothing of creative energy.

The enormous mass of humanity in the whole enormous territory was held together by one bond only: the Roman state; and the Roman state had become in the course of time their worst enemy and oppressor.

The provinces had annihilated Rome; Rome itself had become a provincial town like the rest – privileged, but no longer the ruler, no longer the hub of the world empire, not even the seat of the emperors or sub-emperors, who now lived in Constantinople, Treves, Milan.

The Roman state had become a huge, complicated machine, exclusively for bleeding its subjects.

Taxes, state imposts and tributes of every kind pressed the mass of the people always deeper into poverty; the pressure was intensified until the exactions of governors, tax-collectors, and armies made it unbearable.

That was what the Roman state had achieved with its world rule.

It gave as the justification of its existence that it maintained order within the empire and protected it against the barbarians without.

But its order was worse than the worst disorder, and the citizens whom it claimed to protect against the barbarians longed for the barbarians to deliver them.


Social conditions were no less desperate.

Already in the last years of the republic the policy of Roman rule had been ruthlessly to exploit the provinces; the empire, far from abolishing this exploitation, had organized it.

The more the empire declined, the higher rose the taxes and levies, the more shamelessly the officials robbed and extorted.

The Romans had always been too occupied in ruling other nations to become proficient in trade and industry; it was only as usurers that they beat all who came before or after.


What commerce had already existed and still survived was now ruined by official extortion; it struggled on only in the eastern, Greek part of the empire, which lies outside the present study.

General impoverishment; decline of commerce, handicrafts and art; fall in the population; decay of the towns; relapse of agriculture to a lower level - such was the final result of Roman world rule.

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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VIII. The Formation of the State among Germans, continued ...

Agriculture, always the decisive branch of production throughout the ancient world, was now more so than ever.

In Italy, the enormous estates (latifundia) which, since the end of the republic, occupied almost the whole country, had been exploited in two different ways.

They had been used either as pastures, the population being displaced by sheep and cattle, which could be tended by a few slaves, or as country estates (villae), where large-scale horticulture was carried on with masses of slaves, partly as a luxury for the owner, partly for sale in the town markets.

The great grazing farms had kept going and had probably even extended; the country estates and their gardens had been ruined through the impoverishment of their owners and the decay of the towns.

The system of latifundia run by slave labor no longer paid; but at that time no other form of large-scale agriculture was possible.

Small production had again become the only profitable form.

One country estate after another was cut up into small lots, which were handed over either to tenants, who paid a fixed sum and had hereditary rights, or to partiarii_, stewards rather than tenants, who received a sixth or even only a ninth of the year's product in return for their labor.

For the most part, however, these small lots of land were given out to coloni, who paid for them a definite yearly amount, were tied to the soil and could be sold together with their lot.

True, they were not slaves, but neither were they free; they could not marry free persons, and their marriages with one another were not regarded as full marriages, but, like those of slaves, as mere concubinage (contubernium).

They were the forerunners of the medieval serfs.

The slavery of classical times had outlived itself.

Whether employed on the land in large-scale agriculture or in manufacture in the towns, it no longer yielded any satisfactory return – the market for its products was no longer there.

But the small-scale agriculture and the small handicraft production to which the enormous production of the empire in its prosperous days was now shrunk had no room for numbers of slaves.

Only for the domestic and luxury slaves of the wealthy was there still a place in society.

But though it was dying out, slavery was still common enough to make all productive labor appear to be work for slaves, unworthy of free Romans – and everybody was a free Roman now.

Hence, on the one side, increasing manumissions of the superfluous slaves who were now a burden; on the other hand, a growth in some parts in the numbers of the coloni, and in other parts of the declassed freemen (like the “poor whites” in the ex-slave states of America).

Christianity is completely innocent of the gradual dying out of ancient slavery; it was itself actively involved in the system for centuries under the Roman Empire, and never interfered later with slave-trading by Christians: not with the Germans in the north, or with the Venetians in the Mediterranean, or with the later trade in Negroes. [2]

Slavery no longer paid; it was for that reason it died out.

But in dying it left behind its poisoned sting – the stigma attaching to the productive labor of freemen.

This was the blind alley from which the Roman world had no way out: slavery was economically impossible, the labor of freemen was morally ostracized.

The one could be the basic form of social production no longer; the other, not yet.

Nothing could help here except a complete revolution.

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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VIII. The Formation of the State among Germans, continued ...

Things were no better in the provinces.

We have most material about Gaul.

Here there was still a free small peasantry in addition to coloni.

In order to be secured against oppression by officials, judges, and usurers, these peasants often placed themselves under the protection, the patronage, of a powerful person; and it was not only individuals who did so, but whole communities, so that in the fourth century the emperors frequently prohibited the practice.

But what help was this protection to those who sought it?

Their patron made it a condition that they should transfer to him the rights of ownership in their pieces of land, in return for which he guaranteed them the use of the land for their lifetime – a trick which the Holy Church took note of and in the ninth and tenth centuries lustily imitated, to the increase of God’s glory and its own lands.

At this time, it is true, about the year 475, Bishop Salvianus of Marseilles still inveighs indignantly against such theft.

He relates that oppression by Roman officials and great landlords had become so heavy that many “Romans” fled into districts already occupied by the barbarians, and that the Roman citizens settled there feared nothing so much as a return to Roman rule.

That parents owing to their poverty often sold their children into slavery at this time is proved by a decree prohibiting the practice.

In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the German barbarians took from them two-thirds of all the land and divided it among themselves.

The division was made according to the gentile constitution.

The conquerors being relatively few in number, large tracts of land were left undivided, as the property partly of the whole people, partly of the individual tribes and gentes.

Within each gens the arable and meadow land was distributed by lot in equal portions among the individual households.

We do not know whether reallotments of the land were repeatedly carried out at this time, but in any event they were soon discontinued in the Roman provinces and the individual lots became alienable private property, allodium.

Woods and pastures remained undivided for common use; the provisions regulating their common use, and the manner in which the divided land was to be cultivated, were settled in accordance with ancient custom and by the decision of the whole community.

The longer the gens remained settled in its village and the more the Germans and the Romans gradually merged, the more the bond of union lost its character of kinship and became territorial.

The gens was lost in the mark community, in which, however, traces of its origin in the kinship of its members are often enough still visible.

Thus, at least in those countries where the mark community maintained itself - northern France, England, Germany and Scandinavia - the gentile constitution changed imperceptibly into a local constitution and thus became capable of incorporation into the state.

But it nevertheless retained that primitive democratic character which distinguishes the whole gentile constitution, and thus even in its later enforced degeneration and up to the most recent times it kept something of the gentile constitution alive, to be a weapon in the hands of the oppressed.

This weakening of the bond of blood in the gens followed from the degeneration of the organs of kinship also in the tribe and in the entire people as a result of their conquests.

As we know, rule over subjugated peoples is incompatible with the gentile constitution.

Here we can see this on a large scale.

The German peoples, now masters of the Roman provinces, had to organize what they had conquered.

But they could neither absorb the mass of Romans into the gentile bodies nor govern them through these bodies.

At the head of the Roman local governing bodies, many of which continued for the time being to function, had to be placed a substitute for the Roman state, and this substitute could only be another state.

The organs of the gentile constitution had to be transformed into state organs, and that very idly, for the situation was urgent.

But the immediate representative of the conquering people was their military leader.

To secure the conquered territory against attack from within and without, it was necessary to strengthen his power.

The moment had come to transform the military leadership into kinship: the transformation was made.

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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VIII. The Formation of the State among Germans, continued ...

Let us take the country of the Franks.

Here the victorious Salian people had come into complete possession, not only of the extensive Roman state domains, but also of the very large tracts of land which had not been distributed among the larger and smaller district and mark communities, in particular all the larger forest areas.

On his transformation from a plain military chief into the real sovereign of a country, the first thing which the king of the Franks did was to transform this property of the people into crown lands, to steal it from the people and to give it, outright or in fief, to his retainers.

This retinue, which originally consisted of his personal following of warriors and of the other lesser military leaders, was presently increased not only by Romans – Romanized Gauls, whose education, knowledge of writing, familiarity with the spoken Romance language of the country and the written Latin language, as well as with the country's laws, soon made them indispensable to him, but also by slaves, serfs and freedmen, who composed his court and from whom he chose his favorites.

All these received their portions of the people's land, at first generally in the form of gifts, later of benefices, usually conferred, to begin with, for the king's lifetime.

Thus, at the expense of the people the foundation of a new nobility was laid.

And that was not all.

The wide extent of the kingdom could not be governed with the means provided by the old gentile constitution; the council of chiefs, even if it had not long since become obsolete, would have been unable to meet, and it was soon displaced by the permanent retinue of the king; the old assembly of the people continued to exist in name, but it also increasingly became a mere assembly of military leaders subordinate to the king, and of the new rising nobility.

By the incessant civil wars and wars of conquest (the latter were particularly frequent under Charlemagne), the free land-owning peasants, the mass of the Frankish people, were reduced to the same state of exhaustion and penury as the Roman peasants in the last years of the Republic.

Though they had originally constituted the whole army and still remained its backbone after the conquest of France, by the beginning of the ninth century they were so impoverished that hardly one man in five could go to the wars.

The army of free peasants raised directly by the king was replaced by an army composed of the serving-men of the new nobles, including bondsmen, descendants of men who in earlier times had known no master save the king and still earlier no master at all, not even a king.

The internal wars under Charlemagne's successors, the weakness of the authority of the crown, and the corresponding excesses of the nobles (including the counts instituted by Charlemagne, who were now striving to make their office hereditary), had already brought ruin on the Frankish peasantry, and the ruin was finally completed by the invasions of the Norsemen.

Fifty years after the death of Charlemagne, the Empire of the Franks lay as defenseless at the feet of the Norsemen as the Roman Empire, four hundred years earlier, had lain at the feet of the Franks.

Not only was there the same impotence against enemies from without, but there was almost the same social order or rather disorder within.

The free Frankish peasants were in a plight similar to their predecessors, the Roman coloni.

Plundered, and ruined by wars, they had been forced to put themselves under the protection of the new nobles or of the Church, the crown being too weak to protect them.

But they had to pay dearly for it.

Like the Gallic peasants earlier, they had to transfer their rights of property in land to their protecting lord and received the land back from him in tenancies of various and changing forms, but always only in return for services and dues.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
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Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY

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Frederick Engels

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State


VIII. The Formation of the State among Germans, continued ...

Once in this position of dependence, they gradually lost their personal freedom also; after a few generations most of them were already serfs.

How rapid was the disappearance of the free peasantry is shown by Irminon’s records of the monastic possessions of the Abbey of Saint Germain des Prés, at that time near, now in, Paris.

On the huge holdings of this Abbey, which were scattered in the surrounding country, there lived in Charlemagne’s time 2,788 households, whose members were almost without exception Franks with German names.

They included 2,080 coloni, 35 lites [semi-free peasants – Ed.], 220 slaves, and only eight freehold tenants!

The godless practice, as Salvianus had called it, by which the protecting lord had the peasant’s land transferred to himself as his own property, and only gave it back to the peasant for use during life, was now commonly employed by the Church against the peasants.

The forced services now imposed with increasing frequency had had their prototype as much in the Roman angariae, compulsory labor for the state, as in the services provided by members of the German marks for bridge and road-making and other common purposes.

To all appearances, therefore, after four hundred years, the mass of the people were back again where they had started.

But that only proved two things: first, that the social stratification and the distribution of property in the declining Roman Empire completely correspond to the level of agricultural and industrial production at that time, and had therefore been inevitable; secondly, that this level of production had neither risen nor fallen significantly during the following four centuries and had therefore with equal necessity again produced the same distribution of property and the same classes in the population.

In the last centuries of the Roman Empire the town had lost its former supremacy over the country, and in the first centuries of German rule it had not regained it.

This implies a low level of development both in agriculture and industry.

This general situation necessarily produces big ruling landowners and a dependent small peasantry.

How impossible it was to graft onto such a society either the Roman system of latifundia worked by slave-labor or the newer large-scale agriculture worked by forced services is proved by Charlemagne's experiments with the famous imperial country estates (villae).

These experiments were gigantic in scope, but they left scarcely a trace.

They were continued only by the monasteries, and only for them were they fruitful.

But the monasteries were abnormal social bodies, founded on celibacy; they could produce exceptional results, but for that very reason necessarily continued to be exceptional themselves.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
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