shade of meaning and that amount of weight to any term which it
possessed in the age in which it was used, carefully distinguishing
this from its use in any earlier or later age. The importance of this
caution will be soon seen when we come to discuss the origin of
corporate life in the communes, where many have been misled by
attaching to the words _respublica_ and _civitas_, for example, so
continually recurring in the old laws and charters, a meaning which
was entirely foreign to the terms at the period of their use. With
this warning, we will turn to a consideration of the first effects of
the inroad of the northern barbarians on the cities, whose exhausted
and defenseless state has already been pointed out.

One of the chief characteristics of the Teutonic tribes which overran
Italy during the fifth and sixth centuries, was an innate hatred of
cities, of enclosing walls and crowded habitations. Children of the
field and the forest, they had their village communities and their
hundreds, their common land and their allotted land, but these were
small restrictions on their free life, and left an extended
"air-space" for each individual and his immediate household. Homestead
was not too near homestead, each man being separated from his neighbor
by the extent of half the land belonging to each. The centralization
of population in city life was a thing undreamed of, and an idea
abhorred, alike for its novelty and for the violence it did to the as
yet untrained instincts of the people. The strong, independent
individualism of the Teutonic freeman rebelled against anything which
would in any way limit his freedom of action: "ne pati quidem inter se
junctas sedes," says Tacitus.[3] An agriculturist in his rude way, he
lived on the land which supported him and his family, and feeling no
further need, his untrained intelligence could form no conception of
the necessities and the advantages of the social union and