under the protectorate of a man of influence and power. Not only single individuals did so, but whole communities, so that the emperors of the fourth century often issued decrees prohibiting this practice. But what good did protection do to the clients? The patron imposed the condition that they should transfer the title of their lots to him, and in return he assured them of the free enjoyment of their land for life—a trick which the holy church remembered and freely imitated during the ninth and tenth century, for the greater glory of God. In the fifth century, however, about the year 475, Bishop Salvianus of Marseilles still vehemently denounced such robbery and relates that the methods of the Roman officials and great landlords became so oppressive that many "Romans" fled to the districts occupied by the barbarians and feared nothing so much as a return under Roman rule. That poor parents frequently sold their children into slavery, is proved by a law forbidding this practice.
In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the barbarians appropriated two-thirds of the entire land and divided it among themselves. The distribution was made by gentile rules. As the number of the conquerors was relatively small, large tracts remained undivided in the possession of the nation, the tribe or the gens. Every gens distributed the land for cultivation and pastures to the individual households by drawing lots. We do not know whether repeated divisions took place at that time. At any rate, this practice was soon discarded in the Roman provinces, and the individual lot became salable private property, a so-called freehold (allodium). Forests and pastures remained undivided for collective use. This use and the mode of cultivating the divided land was regulated by tradition and the will of the community. The longer the gens lived in its village, and the better Germans and Romans became amalgamated in the course of time, the more did the character of kinship lose ground before territorial bounds. The gens disappeared in the mark commune, the members of which, however, still exhibited traces of kinship. In the countries where mark communes were still preserved—in