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MEDIÆVAL SOCIETY—EARLY PERIOD
WE have now to deal with that 60 Mediæval Society which was based on the fusion of the ideas of tribal communism and Roman individualism and bureaucracy respectively.
The transition from the Pax Romana, the final establishment of the Roman Empire, the high-water mark of classical civilisation, to the apparent chaos which followed the successful inroads of the barbarian tribes in the 5th century is long and obscure. But the fact before hinted at of the corruption of the Empire into a mere centralised tax-gathering machine is obvious enough to the careful student of history. 61 The ancient aristocratic families of the provinces were, under the name of the Decuriones, made responsible for the taxes, and had the odium of acting as tax-gatherers, their own estates suffering if they failed to obtain the full amount decreed. As the resources of the Empire began to decline, the central government squeezed so much the harder, and, as before stated, the position of these Decuriones became intolerable, so that they were driven to the wholesale manumission of their slaves. These now became serfs, owing service to their former masters, and being the necessary human live-stock of the great estates once owned by those masters. It seems most probable that these necessary circumstances, fused with the system of the Teutonic Mark, gradually produced the Manor, which was the basis of mediaeval economic life. This, of course, only applies to those countries which had been more or less definitely Romanised. In other non-Romanised lands the serfs were the descendants of the