The transformation of medieval society is, for Kemble, intimately connected with the forms of ownership in land. The scanty population of ancient times had divided only a very small part of the country into separate holdings. The rest remained in the hands of the people to supply the wants of coming generations. The great turn towards feudalism was given by the fact that this reserve-fund lapsed into the hands of a few magnates: the mass of free people being deprived of its natural sphere of expansion was forced to seek its subsistence at the hands of private lords (loaf-givers). From the point of view of personal status the same process appears in the decrease of freedom among the people and in the increase of the so-called Gesid. According to Teutonic principles a man is free only if he has land to feed upon, strength to work, and arms to defend himself. The landless man is unfree; and so is the Gesidcundman, the follower, however strong and wealthy he may be through his chiefs grace. The contrast between the free ceorls tilling their own land and the band of military followers, who are always considered as personally dependent -- this contrast is a marked one. From the first this military following had played an important part in German history. Most raids and invasions had been its work, and sometimes whole tribes were attracted into its organisation, but during the first period of Saxon history the free people were sufficiently strong to hold down the power of military chiefs within certain bounds. Not so in later development. With the growth of population, of inequalities, of social competition, the relations of dependency are seen constantly gaining on the field of freedom. The spread of commendation leads not only to a change in the distribution of ranks, but to a dismemberment of political power, to all kinds of franchises and private encroachments on the State.
I may be excused for marshalling all these well-known points before the public by the consideration that they must serve to show how intimately these views are connected with the general principles of a great school. The stress laid by Kemble on property in land ought to be noticed especially: land gets to be the basis of all political and social condition. This is going much further than Palgrave ever went; though not further than Eichhorn. What actually severs Kemble from the Romantics is his estimate of the free element in the people. He does not try to picture a kind of political Arcadia in Saxon England, but there is no more talk about the rightless condition of the ceorls or the predominance of aristocracy. The Teutonic race towers above everything. Although the existence of Celts after the Conquests is admitted, neither Celtic nor Roman elements appear as exercising any influence in the course of history. Everything takes place as if Germanic communities had been living and growing on soil that had never before been appropriated.
Curiously enough the weakest point of Kemble's doctrine seems to lie in its very centre -- in his theory of social groups. One is often reminded of Grimm by his account of the Mark, and it was an achievement to call attention to such a community as distinct from the tribal group, but the political, legal, and economical description of the Mark is very vague. As to the reasoning about gilds, tithings, and hundreds, it is based on a constant confusion of widely different subjects.
Generally speaking, it is not for a lawyer's acuteness and precision that one has to look in Kemble's book: important distinctions very often get blurred in his exposition, and though constantly protesting against abstract theories and suppositions not based on fact, he indulges in them a great deal himself.
Still Kemble's work was very remarkable: his extensive, if not very critical study of the charters opened his eyes to the first-rate importance of the law of real property in the course of medieval history: this was a great step in advance of Palgrave, who had recognised law as the background of history, but whose attention had been directed almost exclusively to the formal side to judicial institutions. And Kemble actually succeeded in bringing forward some of the questions which were to remain for a long time the main points of debate among historians.
The development of the school was evidently to proceed in the direction of greater accuracy and improved methods. Great service has been done in this respect by Konrad Maurer. He is perhaps sometimes inclined to magnify his own independence and dissent from Kemble's opinions, but he has undoubtedly contributed to strengthen and clear up some of Kemble's views, and has gone further than his predecessor on important subjects. He accepts in the main Kemble's doctrines as to the Mark, the allotment of land, the opposition of folkland and bookland, and expounds them with greater fulness and better insight into the evidence. On the other hand he goes his own way as to the Gesids (Gefolgschaft), and the part played by large estates in the political process.
Maurer reduces the importance of the former and lays more stress on the latter than Kemble. Altogether the German scholar's investigations have been of great moment, and this not only for methodical reasons, but also because they lead to a complete emancipation of the school from Eichhorn's influence.
