Celts and Germans. The origin of the family, private property and the state in connection with the studies of Lewis G

VII GENUS OF THE CELTICS AND GERMANS

The scope of this work does not allow us to consider in detail the institutions of the tribal system that still exist today among a wide variety of wild and barbarian peoples in a more or less pure form, or traces of these institutions in ancient history Asian cultural peoples [Further text in this paragraph up to the words "Here we confine ourselves" was added by Engels in the 1891 edition. Ed.]. Both are found everywhere. A few examples will suffice. Even before they knew what the genus was, McLennan, who made the most effort to confuse the meaning of this concept, proved its existence and, in general, correctly described it among the Kalmyks, Circassians, Samoyeds [The former name of the Nenets. Ed.] and among the three Indian peoples, the Varli, the Magars and the Manipuri. Recently M. Kovalevsky discovered and described it among the Pshavs, Khevsurs, Svans and other Caucasian tribes. Here we confine ourselves to some brief remarks on the existence of the genus among the Celts and Germans.

The oldest surviving Celtic laws show us the genus full of life; in Ireland it lives, at least instinctively, in the minds of the people even now, after the English forcibly destroyed it; in Scotland it was in full bloom as early as the middle of the last century, and here also it was destroyed only by the arms, legislation and courts of the English.

Old Welsh laws, written many centuries before the English conquest, at the latest in the 11th century, still testify to the presence of the joint cultivation of the land by entire villages, although in the form of only a survival of a previously common custom, as an exception; each family had five acres for self-cultivation; as well as. with this, one plot was worked together and the crop was to be divided. There is no doubt that these rural communities are clans or divisions of clans; the analogy with Ireland and Scotland already proves this, even if a new study of Welsh law, for which I have no time (my excerpts are from 1869), would not directly confirm this. But on the other hand, Welsh sources, and with them Irish ones, directly prove that among the Celts in the 11th century, pair marriage was by no means supplanted by monogamy. In Wales, marriage became indissoluble, or rather irrevocable at the request of one of the parties, only after seven years had elapsed. If up to seven years only three nights were missing, then the spouses could disperse. Then the division of property was carried out: the wife divided, the husband chose his part. Household utensils were divided according to certain, very curious rules. If the marriage was dissolved by the husband, then he had to return to his wife her dowry and some other items; if a wife, she received less. Of the children, the husband received two, the wife - one child, namely the middle one. If the wife, after a divorce, entered into a new marriage, and the first husband wanted to get her again, then she had to follow him, even if she had already set foot on a new marital bed. But if they lived together for seven years, they became husband and wife even if the marriage had not been formalized before. The chastity of girls before marriage was by no means strictly observed or required; the rules related to this are of a very frivolous nature and do not at all correspond to bourgeois morality. If a woman committed adultery, the husband could beat her (one of the three cases when he was allowed to do this, in all the others he was punished for it), but after that he had no right to demand another satisfaction, because

“for the same offense, either expiation or revenge is due, but not both.”

play a significant role in the collection of laws. Women enjoyed the right to vote in popular assemblies. Let us add to this that the existence of similar orders has been proved for Ireland; that temporary marriages were also quite common there, and that the wife, on divorce, was provided with well-defined great advantages, even compensation for her work in the household; that the “first wife” met there along with other wives and no distinction was made in the division of the inheritance between married and illegitimate children. Thus, we have a picture of pair marriage, in comparison with which: the existing form of marriage in North America seems strict, but in the 11th century this is not surprising in a people who, even in the time of Caesar, lived in group marriage.

The existence of an Irish clan (sept, the tribe was called clainne, clan) is confirmed and described not only in ancient collections of laws, but also by English lawyers of the 17th century, who were sent to Ireland to turn the lands of the clans into crown possessions English king. The land, up to this very time, was the common property of the clan or gens, unless it had already been converted by the chiefs into their private pre-menial possessions. When a member of the clan died and, consequently, one of the households ceased to exist, the elder (caput cognationis, as the English lawyers called him) undertook a new redistribution of all the land between the remaining farms. The latter was probably produced in general according to the rules in force in Germany. Even now, in some places in the villages, there are fields included in the so-called rundale system, forty or fifty years ago there were a lot of such fields. Peasants, individual tenants of land that previously belonged to the whole family, and then seized by the English conquerors, each pay rent for their plot, but connect all the arable and meadow land of their plots together, divide it depending on location and quality into “horses” [“ Gewanne"], as they are called on the Moselle, and give to each his share in each horse; swamps and pastures are in common use. Fifty years ago, redistributions were made from time to time, sometimes annually. The boundary plan of such a village, where the rundale system operates, looks exactly the same as the plan of some German household on the Moselle or in Hochwald. The genus continues to live also in "factions" ["parties". Ed.], Irish peasants are often divided into parties that differ in completely meaningless or outwardly absurd signs, absolutely incomprehensible to the British, and as if pursuing no other goal than the brawls of these parties among themselves, which are beloved on solemn days. This is an artificial revival of the destroyed clans, a substitute for them, which appeared after their death, in a way testifying to the vitality of the inherited tribal instinct. However, in some localities, members of the genus still live together in the old territory; so, back in the thirties, the vast majority of the inhabitants of County Monaghan had only four surnames, that is, they came from four genera or clans [For a few days spent in Ireland , I again vividly realized to what extent rural population lives there with the ideas of the ancestral epoch. The landowner, from whom the peasant rents land, appears to the latter as a kind of clan leader, obliged to dispose of the land in the interests of all; the peasant believes that he is paying tribute to him in the form of rent, but in case of need he must receive help from him. They also believe that every richer person is obliged to help his less wealthy neighbors when they are in need. Such help is not alms, it is rightfully due to a less wealthy clan member from a richer one or from the clan leader. The complaints of economists and lawyers about the impossibility of impressing the Irish peasant with the concept of modern bourgeois property are understandable; property, which has only rights and no duties, simply does not fit in the head of the Irish. But it is also understandable that the Irish, who suddenly find themselves with such naive, tribal ideas, in large English or American cities, in an environment with completely different moral and legal views - that such Irish people easily turn out to be completely confused in matters of morality and law. , lose all ground under their feet and often become victims of demoralization on a massive scale. (Engels' note to the 1891 edition.)]

In Scotland, the death of the tribal system coincides with the suppression of the 1745 rebellion. It remains to be investigated which link in this system the Scottish clan represents, but that it is such a link is beyond doubt. In the novels of Walter Scott, this clan of the highlands of Scotland stands before us, as if alive. This clan, says Morgan,

“an excellent example of the clan in its organization and in its spirit, a striking example of the power of tribal life over members of the clan ... In their strife and in their blood feud, in the distribution of territory among clans, in their joint land use, in the loyalty of clan members to the leader and to each other, we we find universally stable features of a tribal society ... Descent was considered in accordance with paternal law, so that the children of men remained in the clan, while the children of women passed into the clans of their fathers.

But that mother-right previously dominated Scotland is proved by the fact that, according to Bede, in royal family Pictish inheritance was through the female line. Even the vestige of the punaluan family was preserved by both the Welsh and the Scots until the Middle Ages in the form of the right of the first night, which, if it was not redeemed, could be used in relation to each bride by the clan leader or king as the last representative of the former common husbands. [In the 1884 edition, these words are followed by a text omitted by Engels in the 1891 edition: “The same right - in North America it is found quite often in the extreme northwest - also operated among the Russians; it was abolished by Grand Duchess Olga in the 10th century.” The following is a paragraph on "Communist farms of serf families in Niverne and Franche-Comte, similar to Slavic family communities in Serbo-Croatian lands", transferred by Engels in the 1891 edition to Chapter II and included by him in a slightly modified form in one of the appendices to this chapter ( see this volume, pp. 62–63). Ed.]

* * *

There is no doubt that the Germans, right up to the migration of peoples, were organized into clans. They apparently occupied the territory between the Danube, the Rhine, the Vistula and northern seas only a few centuries BC; The resettlement of the Cimbri and Teutons was then still in full swing, and the Suebi settled firmly only in the time of Caesar. Of the latter, Caesar definitely says that they were settled by clans and kindred groups (gen-tibus cognationibusque), and in the mouth of a Roman from gens Julia [genus Yuliev. Ed.] this word gentibus has a well-defined and indisputable meaning. This applied to all Germans; even in the conquered Roman provinces they still settled, apparently in clans. The Alemannic Truth confirms that in the conquered land south of the Danube, the people settled in clans (gene-alogiae); the concept of genealogia is used here in exactly the same sense as later the brand community or rural community [Further text up to the words: “Like among the Mexicans and Greeks, so among the Germans” (see this volume, p. 136) was included by Engels in the 1891 edition instead of the following text printed in the 1884 edition: “Thus we see that one of Germanic peoples, and it was again the Suebi who settled here in clans, gentes, and each clan was assigned a certain territory. Among the Burgundians and Lombards, the genus was called fara, and the name of members of the genus (faramanni) used in the Burgundian Truth also means the Burgundians themselves, in contrast to the Roman population, which, naturally, was not part of the Burgundian clans. The distribution of land occurred, therefore, among the Burgundians also by clan. This is how the question of the faramanni, over which German jurists racked their brains in vain for hundreds of years, is resolved. The name fara was hardly general designation genus among all Germans, although we find it in one people of the Gothic and in another people of the Herminonian (High German) branch. In German, there are a large number of roots used to denote kinship, and they are simultaneously used in expressions that, as we can assume, are related to gender. Ed.]. Recently, Kovalevsky expressed the view that these gene-alogiae were large household communities, between which the land was divided and from which the rural community only subsequently developed. The same may then apply to fara, an expression which among the Burgundians and Lombards - hence the Gothic and Herminonian or High German tribe - meant almost, if not quite, the same as the word genealogia in the Alemannic Truth. ". Whether we really have a clan or a home community before us is still subject to further research.

Monuments of language are left before us open question as to whether all the Germans had a common expression for denoting the genus - and which one. Etymologically Greek genos, Latin gens corresponds to Gothic kuni, Middle High German kunne, and the word is used in the same sense. The time of motherhood is indicated by the fact that the word for woman comes from the same root: Greek gyne, Slavic zena, Gothic qvino, Old Norse kona, kuna. - Among the Lombards and Burgundians, as already mentioned, we find the word fara, which Grimm derives from the hypothetical root fisan - to give birth. I would rather come from a more obvious origin from faran - ride [in German fahren. Ed.], roam, return, as designations for a certain part of a nomadic group, consisting, of course, only of relatives - a designation that, during the centuries-old migrations, first to the east, and then to

west was gradually shifted to itself tribal community. - Further, Gothic sibja, Anglo-Saxon sib, Old High German sippia, sippa - relatives [in German Sippe. Ed.]. Only found in Old Norse plural sifjar - relatives; in singular- only as the name of the goddess Sif. - And, finally, in the “Song of Hildebrand” another expression comes across, exactly in the place where Hildebrand asks Hadubrand:

"Who is your father among the men of the people ... or what kind are you?" ("eddo huelihhes cnuosles dusis").

If there was a general Germanic designation for the genus at all, then it obviously sounded like the Gothic kuni; this is evidenced not only by the identity with the corresponding expression in related languages, but also the fact that the word kuning comes from it - king [in German Konig. Ed.] which originally denotes the elder of a clan or tribe. The word sibja, relatives, does not seem to be taken into account; at least sifjar means in Old Norse not only blood relatives, but also relatives, that is, it includes members of at least two genera: the word sif itself, therefore, could not be a designation of a genus.

As among the Mexicans and Greeks, so among the Germans, the formation of battle order in the detachment of cavalry and in the wedge-shaped column of infantry took place according to tribal associations; if Tacitus says: according to families and kindred groups, then this indefinite expression is explained by the fact that in his time the gens in Rome had long ceased to exist as a viable unit.

Of decisive importance is the passage in Tacitus where it is said that a mother's brother regards his nephew as a son, and some even consider the blood ties between maternal uncle and nephew to be more sacred and closer than the bond between father and son, so that when hostages are demanded, the sister's son is recognized as a greater guarantee than the own son of the person whom they want to bind by this act. Here we have a living survival of the genus, organized in accordance with maternal law, hence the original, and, moreover, one that constitutes distinguishing feature Germans [The connection of a particularly close nature between a maternal uncle and a nephew, dating back to the era of maternal right and found among many peoples, is known to the Greeks only in the mythology of the heroic period. According to Diodorus (IV, 34), Meleager kills the sons of Testius, brothers of his mother Altea. The latter sees in this act such an irredeemable crime that she curses the murderer, her own son, and calls death on him. According to the same Diodorus (IV, 43 and 44), the Argonauts, led by Hercules, landed in Thrace and found there that Phineus, incited by his new wife, subjected his two sons, born of his rejected wife, Cleopatra Boreada, to shameful torture. But among the Argonauts are also the Boreades, the brothers of Cleopatra, that is, the brothers of the mother of the tortured. They immediately stand up for their nephews, free them and kill the guards.]. If a member of this kind gave his own son as a pledge of some solemn obligation, and the son became the victim of a violation of the contract by the father, then this was only the work of the father himself. But if the sister's son was the victim, then the most sacred tribal right was violated; the closest relative of a boy or young man, who was obliged to protect him more than anyone else, became the culprit of his death; this relative either did not have to make him a hostage, or was obliged to fulfill the contract. Even if we did not find any other traces of the tribal system among the Germans, then this place alone would be enough [Further text up to the words: "However, in the time of Tacitus" (see this volume, p. 137) was added by Engels in the 1891 edition. Ed.]

Even more decisive, since this evidence belongs to a later period, after almost 800 years, is one passage from the Old Norse song about the twilight of the gods and the death of the world "Voluspa". In this "Prophecy of the Seer," in which, as Bang and Bugge have now proved, elements of Christianity are also interwoven, in describing the era of general degeneration

and the corruption that preceded great catastrophe, says:

"Broedhr munu berjask ok at bonum verdask,
munu systrungar sifjum spilla".

“The brothers will quarrel and kill each other each other,
sisters' children will break the ties of kinship."

However, in the time of Tacitus, among the Germans, at least among those better known to him [The words "at least better known to him" were added by Engels in the 1891 edition. Ed.], maternal right has already given way to paternal; children inherited from their father; in the absence of children, brothers and uncles from the paternal and maternal side inherited. The admission of the mother's brother to the inheritance is connected with the preservation of the custom just mentioned, and also proves how new paternal right was still then among the Germans. Traces of maternal law are also found for a long time in the Middle Ages. Even at that time, apparently, they did not really rely on descent from the father, especially among serfs; so, when the feudal lord demanded back from some city an escaped serf, then, as, for example, in Augsburg, Basel, Kaiserslautern, the defendant's serfdom had to be confirmed under an oath by six of his closest blood relatives, and, moreover, exclusively from the maternal side (Maurer, " Urban arrangement”, I, p. 381).

Another remnant of the recently dead maternal right can be seen in the respect of the Germans for the female sex, which for the Roman was almost incomprehensible. Girls from a noble family were recognized as the most reliable hostages when concluding agreements with the Germans; the idea that their wives and: daughters can be captured and slavery is terrible for them and more than anything else excites their courage in battle; in a woman they see something sacred and prophetic; they listen to her advice even in important matters; thus, Veleda, the priestess of the Bructerian tribe on Lippa, was the soul of the whole Batavian uprising, during which Civilis, at the head of the Germans and Belgae, shook Roman rule over all of Gaul. At home, the dominance of the wife seems to be undeniable; True, all the household chores lie on her, on the old people and children; the husband is hunting, drinking or lounging. Thus says Tacitus; but since he does not say who tills the field, and expressly states that the slaves paid only dues, and did not serve any corvee, it is obvious that a mass of adult men still had to do the little work that agriculture required.

The form of marriage was, as already mentioned above, a pair marriage gradually approaching monogamy. This was not yet strict monogamy, since polygamy of nobles was allowed. The chastity of girls was generally strictly observed (as opposed to the Celts), and likewise Tacitus speaks with particular warmth of inviolability marriage union at the Germans. He cites only the wife's adultery as grounds for divorce. But his story leaves many gaps here, and besides, it too obviously serves as a mirror of virtue for the corrupt Romans. One thing is certain: if the Germans were in their forests these exceptional knights of virtue, then only the slightest contact with the outside world was enough to bring them down to the level of the rest of the average Europeans; the last vestige of moral rigor disappeared from the Roman world much faster than the Germanic language. It is enough to read Gregory of Tours. It goes without saying that in the German virgin forests, as in Rome, sophisticated excesses in sensual pleasures could not dominate, and thus the Germans still have a sufficient advantage over the Roman world in this respect, even if we do not attribute to them that abstinence. in carnal affairs, which has never been anywhere general rule for the whole people.

From the tribal system followed the obligation to inherit not only friendly relations, but also hostile relations of the father or relatives; likewise inherited wergeld - an expiatory fine paid instead of blood feud for murder or damage. The existence of this wergeld, recognized by the past generation as a specifically Germanic institution, has now been proven for hundreds of peoples. This is general form mitigation of blood feuds arising from the tribal system. We meet it, like the obligatory hospitality, also, by the way, among the American Indians; description of the customs of hospitality in Tacitus ("Germany", ch. 21) coincides almost to the smallest detail with Morgan's story about the hospitality of his Indians.

I leave the previous paragraph unchanged, as it was in previous editions. During this time, things took a different turn. After Kovalevsky (see above, p. 44 [Cm. present volume, pp. 61–62. Ed.]) proved the widespread, if not ubiquitous, spread of the patriarchal home community as an intermediate step between the communist mother-right family and the modern isolated family, it is no longer a question, as it was in the dispute between Maurer and Weitz, - common or private ownership of land, but what was the form of common ownership. There is no doubt that in the time of Caesar, the Suebi not only had common property, but also joint cultivation of the land. joint forces. It will be possible to argue for a long time whether the genus was the economic unit, or whether it was the home community, or some intermediate communist kindred group between them, or, depending on land conditions, all three groups existed. But Kovalevsky argues that the orders described by Tacitus do not presuppose the existence of a community-mark or rural community, and the home community; only from this latter, much later, as a result of population growth, a rural community developed.

According to this view, the settlements of the Germans in the territories they occupied in Roman times, as well as in those subsequently taken from the Romans, did not consist of villages, but of large family communities that spanned several generations, occupied an appropriate piece of land for cultivation and used the surrounding wastelands. together with neighbors as a common brand. The passage in Tacitus, where it is said that they change the cultivated land, should then really be understood in the agronomic sense: the community each year plowed a different plot, and left the arable land of the previous year left fallow or completely overgrown. With a sparse population, there was always enough free wastelands, which made any disputes over the possession of land superfluous. Only centuries later, when the number of members of household communities increased so much that, under the then conditions of production, it was no longer possible to maintain general economy, these communities broke up; arable lands and meadows that were previously in common ownership began to be divided according to already known way between the separate households that now arose, at first for a time, later - once and for all, while forests, pastures and waters remained common.

For Russia, such a course of development seems to be historically fully proven. As regards Germany, and secondarily the rest of the Germanic countries, it cannot be denied that this assumption is in many respects a better explanation of the sources and more easily resolves the difficulties than the hitherto prevailing view, which pushed back the existence of the rural community back to the time of Tacitus. The oldest documents, such as the Codex Laureshamensis, are generally much better explained in terms of a home community than a rural community-mark. On the other hand, this explanation, in turn, raises new difficulties and new questions that still need to be resolved. This may lead to final decision only new research; I cannot, however, deny the great likelihood of the existence of a home community as an intermediate stage also in Germany, Scandinavia and England.

The organization of management also corresponds to the highest stage of barbarism. Everywhere there was, according to Tacitus, a council of elders (principes), which decided smaller matters, and prepared more important ones for decision in the popular assembly; the latter, in the lowest rung of barbarism, at least where we know of it among the Americans, exists only for the clan, not for the tribe or the union of tribes. The elders (principes) are still sharply distinguished from the military leaders (duces), just like among the Iroquois. The former already live partly on honorary offerings from members of the tribe in cattle, grain, etc.; they are chosen, as in America, for the most part from the same family; the transition to paternal law favors, as in Greece and Rome, the gradual transformation of the elective principle into hereditary law and thereby the emergence of a noble family in each clan. This ancient so-called tribal nobility, for the most part, perished during the migration of peoples, or shortly after it. Warlords were chosen regardless of origin, solely on the basis of ability. Their power was not great, and they had to influence by their example; Tacitus definitely attributes the actual disciplinary power in the army to the priests. The real power was concentrated in the people's assembly. The king or elder of the tribe presides; the people make their decision: the negative - with a murmur, the affirmative - with exclamations of approval and rattling of arms. The people's assembly also serves as a court; complaints are addressed here and they are resolved here, death sentences are pronounced here, and death is supposed only for cowardice, betrayal of one's people and unnatural vices. Within the clans and other divisions, the court also decides everything together under the chairmanship of the elder, who, as in all ancient German legal proceedings, could only lead the process and raise questions; The verdict among the Germans was always and everywhere pronounced by the whole collective.

Since the time of Caesar, alliances of tribes have been formed; some of them already had kings; the supreme commander, like the Greeks and Romans, already sought tyrannical power and sometimes achieved it. Such successful usurpers, however, were by no means unlimited rulers; but they were already beginning to break the fetters of the tribal system. While freed slaves generally occupied a subordinate position, since they could not belong to any kind, among the new kings, favorites from their midst often achieved high positions, wealth and honor. The same thing happened after the conquest of the Roman Empire with the generals who now became kings. major countries. Among the Franks, the king's slaves and freedmen played a large role, first at court and then in the state; most of the new nobility trace their origins to them.

emergence royalty contributed to one institution - squads. We have already seen among the American Redskins how, next to the tribal system, private associations are created to wage war at their own peril and risk. These private associations have already become permanent alliances with the Germans. A military leader who had gained fame gathered around him a band of prey-hungry young men who owed him personal loyalty, as he did them. He supported and rewarded them, established a certain hierarchy between them; for small campaigns, they served him as a detachment of bodyguards and an army always ready for action, for larger ones - a ready officer corps. However weak these squads must have been, and however weak they actually turned out to be, for example, later at Odoacer in Italy, nevertheless, in their existence the germ of the decline of the ancient freedom of the people was already lurking, and it was precisely this role that they played during the migration of peoples and after it. . For, in the first place, they favored the rise of royalty; secondly, as Tacitus already notes, they could be kept as an organized whole only through constant wars and robber raids. Robbery became the goal. If the leader of the squad had nothing to do nearby, he went with his people to other peoples who were at war and could count on prey; German auxiliaries, which in large numbers fought under the Roman banner even against the Germans themselves, recruited partly from such squads. The system of military mercenaries - the shame and curse of the Germans - was already here in its original form. After the conquest of the Roman Empire, these warriors of the kings formed, along with court servants from among the unfree and the Romans, the second of the main constituent parts later knowledge.

Thus, in general, among the Germanic tribes that united into peoples, there was the same organization of government as that which was developed by the Greeks of the heroic era and the Romans of the era of the so-called kings: popular assembly, a council of tribal elders, a military leader who was already striving for genuine royal power. It was the most developed organization of government that could have been formed under the tribal system; for the highest stage of barbarism, she was exemplary. As soon as the society got out of the framework within which this management organization satisfied its purpose, the tribal system came to an end; it collapsed, its place was taken by the state.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State

In connection with the research of Lewis G. Morgan

VII

Genus among the Celts and Germans

The scope of this work does not allow us to consider in detail the institutions of the tribal system, which still exist today among the most diverse savage and barbarian peoples in a more or less pure form, or the traces of these institutions in the ancient history of the Asian civilized peoples. Both are found everywhere. A few examples will suffice. Even before they knew what the genus was, McLennan, who made the most effort to confuse the meaning of this concept, proved its existence and, in general, correctly described it among the Kalmyks, Circassians, Samoyeds (Former name of the Nenets. Ed.) and among the three Indian peoples - Varli, Magars and Manipuri. Recently, M. Kovalevsky discovered and described it among the Pshavs, Khevsurs, Svans and other Caucasian tribes. Here we confine ourselves to some brief remarks on the existence of the genus among the Celts and Germans.

The oldest extant Celtic laws show us the race still full of life; in Ireland it lives, at least instinctively, in the minds of the people even now, after the English forcibly destroyed it; in Scotland it was in full bloom as early as the middle of the last century, and here it was also destroyed only by the weapons, legislation and courts of the English.

Ancient Welsh laws, written down many centuries before the English conquest, at the latest in the 11th century, still testify to the presence of the joint cultivation of the land by entire villages, although in the form of only a remnant of a previously common custom that has been preserved as an exception; each family had five acres for self-cultivation; along with this, one plot was worked together and the crop was to be divided. There is no doubt that these rural communities are clans or divisions of clans; the analogy with Ireland and Scotland already proves this, even if a new study of Welsh law, for which I have no time (my excerpts are from 1869), would not directly confirm this.

But on the other hand, Welsh sources, and with them Irish ones, directly prove that among the Celts in the 11th century, pair marriage was by no means supplanted by monogamy. In Wales, marriage became indissoluble, or rather irrevocable at the request of one of the parties, only after seven years had elapsed. If up to seven years only three nights were missing, then the spouses could disperse. Then the division of property was carried out: the wife divided, the husband chose his part. Household utensils were divided according to certain, very curious rules. If the marriage was dissolved by the husband, then he had to return to his wife her dowry and some other items; if a wife, she received less. Of the children, the husband received two, the wife - one child, namely the middle one. If the wife, after the divorce, entered into a new marriage, and the first husband wanted to get her again, then she should have followed him, even if she had already set foot one foot on the new marital bed. But if they lived together for seven years, they became husband and wife even if the marriage had not been formalized before. The chastity of girls before marriage was by no means strictly observed or required; the rules involved here are of a very frivolous nature and do not at all correspond to bourgeois morality. If a woman was unfaithful, her husband could beat her (one of three cases when it was allowed to him, in all other cases he was subject to punishment for it), but after that he had no right to demand another satisfaction, for

“for the same offense, either expiation or revenge is due, but not both.”

The reasons why a wife could demand a divorce without losing anything from her rights in the division of property were very diverse: it was enough for the husband to have bad breath. The redemption money payable to the leader of the tribe or the king for the right of the first night (gobr merch, whence the medieval name marcheta, in French - marquette) plays a significant role in the collection of laws. Women enjoyed the right to vote in popular assemblies. Let us add to this that the existence of similar orders has been proved for Ireland; that temporary marriages were also quite common there, and that the wife, on divorce, was provided with well-defined great benefits, even compensation for her work in the household; that the “first wife” met there along with other wives and no distinction was made in the division of the inheritance between married and illegitimate children. Thus, we have a picture of pair marriage, in comparison with which the form of marriage existing in North America seems strict, but in the 11th century this is not surprising in a people who, even in the time of Caesar, lived in group marriage.

The existence of an Irish clan (sept, the tribe was called clainne, clan) is confirmed and described not only in ancient collections of laws, but also by English lawyers of the 17th century, who were sent to Ireland to turn the lands of the clans into the crown possessions of the English king. The land, up to this very time, was the common property of the clan or gens, unless it had already been turned by the chiefs into their private dominions. When a member of the clan died and, consequently, one of the households ceased to exist, the elder (caput cognationis, as the English lawyers called him) undertook a new redistribution of all the land between the remaining farms. The latter was probably produced in general according to the rules in force in Germany. Even now, in some places in the villages, there are fields included in the so-called rundale system, forty or fifty years ago there were a lot of such fields. Peasants, individual tenants of land that previously belonged to the whole family, and then seized by the English conquerors, each pay rent for their plot, but connect all the arable and meadow land of their plots together, divide it depending on the location and quality into “horses” [“ Gewanne"], as they are called on the Moselle, and give to each his share in each horse; swamps and pastures are in common use. Fifty years ago, redistributions were made from time to time, sometimes annually. The boundary plan of such a village, where the rundale system operates, looks exactly the same as the plan of some German household on the Moselle or in Hochwald. The genus continues to live also in "factions" (- "parties". Ed.). Irish peasants are often divided into parties, which differ in signs that are completely meaningless or absurd in appearance, absolutely incomprehensible to the English, and as if they do not pursue any other goal than the favorite fights of these parties among themselves on solemn days. This is an artificial revival of the destroyed clans, a substitute for them, which appeared after their death, in a way testifying to the vitality of the inherited tribal instinct. However, in some localities, members of the genus still live together in the old territory; so, back in the thirties, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the county of Monaghan had only four surnames, that is, they came from four clans or clans (In a few days spent in Ireland, I again vividly realized to what extent the rural population still lives there with the ideas of the tribal era. The landowner from whom the peasant rents the land appears to the latter as a kind of clan leader, obliged to dispose of the land in the interests of everyone, the peasant believes that he pays tribute in the form of rent, but in case of need he must receive help from him. that any richer man is obliged to help his less wealthy neighbors when they are in need.Such help is not alms, it is rightfully due to the less wealthy member of the clan from the richer or from the leader of the clan.The complaints of economists and lawyers about the impossibility of inspiring the Irish peasant are understandable. the concept of modern bourgeois property; property,)

In Scotland, the death of the tribal system coincides with the suppression of the 1745 rebellion. It remains to be investigated which link in this system the Scottish clan represents, but that it is such a link is beyond doubt. In the novels of Walter Scott, this clan of the highlands of Scotland rises before us, as if alive. This clan, says Morgan,

“an excellent example of the clan in its organization and in its spirit, a striking example of the power of tribal life over members of the clan ... In their strife and in their blood feud, in the distribution of territory among clans, in their joint land use, in the loyalty of clan members to the leader and to each other, we we find universally stable features of a tribal society ... Descent was considered in accordance with paternal law, so that the children of men remained in the clan, while the children of women passed into the clans of their fathers.

But that maternal right previously dominated Scotland is proved by the fact that, according to Bede, in the royal family of the Picts, inheritance was through the female line. Even the vestige of the punaluan family was preserved by both the Welsh and the Scots until the Middle Ages in the form of the right of the first night, which, if it was not redeemed, could be used in relation to each bride by the clan leader or king as the last representative of the former common husbands. .

* * *

There is no doubt that the Germans, right up to the migration of peoples, were organized into clans. They seem to have occupied the territory between the Danube, the Rhine, the Vistula and the northern seas only a few centuries before our era; The resettlement of the Cimbri and Teutons was then still in full swing, and the Suebi settled firmly only in the time of Caesar. Of the latter, Caesar definitely says that they were settled by clans and kindred groups (gentibus cognationibusque), and in the mouth of a Roman from gens Julia (- the clan of Julius. Ed.) this word gentibus has a very definite and indisputable meaning. This applied to all Germans; even in the conquered Roman provinces, they still settled, apparently in clans. In the "Alemannic Truth" it is confirmed that in the conquered land south of the Danube, the people settled in clans (genealogiae); the concept of genealogia is used here in exactly the same sense as, later, the Marka community or the rural community. Recently, Kovalevsky expressed the view that these genealogiae were large household communities, between which the land was divided and from which the rural community only subsequently developed. The same may then apply to fara, an expression which among the Burgundians and Lombards—and therefore among the Gothic and Herminonian, or High German tribe—denoted almost, if not quite, the same as the word genealogia in the Alemannic Truth. ". Whether we really have a clan or a domestic community before us is still subject to further research.

The monuments of the language leave us open to the question of whether all the Germans had a common expression for denoting the genus - and which one. Etymologically Greek genos, Latin gens corresponds to Gothic kuni, Middle High German künne, and the word is used in the same sense. The time of motherhood is indicated by the fact that the word for woman comes from the same root: Greek gyne, Slavic žena, Gothic qvino, Old Norse kona, kuna. - Among the Lombards and Burgundians, as already mentioned, we meet the word făra, which Grimm derives from the hypothetical root fisan - to give birth. I would prefer to proceed from a more obvious origin from faran - to travel, roam, return, as a designation for some specific part of a nomadic group, consisting, of course, only of relatives - a designation that, during centuries of migration, first to the east, and then to the west was gradually transferred to the tribal community itself. - Further, Gothic sibja, Anglo-Saxon sib, Old High German sippia, sippa - relatives. Old Norse only has the plural sifjar, relatives; in the singular - only as the name of the goddess Sif. And, finally, in the "Song of Hildebrand" another expression comes across, exactly in the place where Hildebrand asks Hadubrand:

"Who is your father among the men of the people ... or what kind are you?" ("eddo huêlîhhes cnuosles du sîs").

If there was a general Germanic designation for the genus at all, then it obviously sounded like the Gothic kuni; this is evidenced not only by the identity with the corresponding expression in related languages, but also by the fact that the word kuning comes from it - king, which originally designates the elder of a clan or tribe. The word sibja, relatives, does not seem to be taken into account; at least sifjar means in Old Norse not only blood relatives, but also relatives, that is, includes members of at least two genera: the word sif itself, therefore, could not be a gender designation.

As among the Mexicans and Greeks, so among the Germans, the formation of battle order in the detachment of cavalry and in the wedge-shaped column of infantry took place according to tribal associations; if Tacitus says: according to families and kindred groups, then this indefinite expression is explained by the fact that in his time the genus in Rome had long ceased to exist as a viable unit.

If a member of this kind gave his own son as a pledge of some solemn obligation, and the son became the victim of a violation of the contract by the father, then this was only the work of the father himself. But if the sister's son was the victim, then the most sacred tribal right was violated; the closest relative of a boy or young man, who was obliged to protect him more than anyone else, became the culprit of his death; this relative either did not have to make him a hostage, or was obliged to fulfill the contract. Even if we did not find any other traces of the tribal system among the Germans, then this place alone would be enough.

Even more decisive, since this evidence belongs to a later period, after almost 800 years, is one passage from the Old Norse song about the twilight of the gods and the death of the world "Völuspâ". In this "Prophecy of the Seer," in which elements of Christianity are also woven, as has now been proved by Bang and Bugge, in describing the era of general degeneration and corruption preceding the great catastrophe, it says:

“Broedhr munu berjask ok at bönum verdask, munu systrungar sifjum spilla".

"Brothers will quarrel and kill each other, sisters' children sever the ties of kinship."

Systrungr means the son of the mother's sister, and the fact that they, the children of the sisters, renounce their mutual consanguinity, seems to the poet an even greater crime than fratricide. This aggravation of the crime is expressed in the word systrungar, which emphasizes kinship on the maternal side; if instead it stood syskina-börn - children of brothers and sisters - or syskina-synir - sons of brothers and sisters, then the second line would mean, in relation to the first, not aggravation, but mitigation. Thus, even in the days of the Vikings, when the "Seer's Broadcast" arose, the memory of motherhood had not yet disappeared in Scandinavia.

However, in the time of Tacitus, among the Germans, at least among those better known to him, maternal right had already given way to paternal; children inherited from their father; in the absence of children, brothers and uncles from the paternal and maternal side inherited. The admission of the mother's brother to the inheritance is connected with the preservation of the custom just mentioned, and also proves how new paternal right was still then among the Germans. Traces of maternal right are also found for a long time in the Middle Ages. Even at that time, apparently, they did not really rely on descent from the father, especially among serfs; so, when the feudal lord demanded back from some city an escaped serf, then, as, for example, in Augsburg, Basel, Kaiserslautern, the defendant's serfdom had to be confirmed under an oath by six of his closest blood relatives, and, moreover, exclusively from the maternal side (Maurer, " Urban arrangement”, I, p. 381).

Another remnant of the recently dead maternal right can be seen in the respect of the Germans for the female sex, which for the Roman was almost incomprehensible. Girls from a noble family were recognized as the most reliable hostages when concluding agreements with the Germans; the thought that their wives and daughters might be captured and enslaved is terrible for them and more than anything else excites their courage in battle; in a woman they see something sacred and prophetic; they listen to her advice even in the most important matters; thus, Veleda, the priestess of the Bructerian tribe on Lippa, was the soul of the whole Batavian uprising, during which Civilis, at the head of the Germans and Belgae, shook Roman rule over all of Gaul. At home, the dominance of the wife seems to be undeniable; True, all the household chores lie on her, on the old people and children; the husband is hunting, drinking or lounging. Thus says Tacitus; but since he does not say who cultivates the field, and explicitly states that the slaves paid only dues, but did not serve any corvée, it is obvious that a mass of adult men still had to do the little work that agriculture required.

The form of marriage was, as already mentioned above, a pair marriage gradually approaching monogamy. This was not yet strict monogamy, since polygamy of nobles was allowed. The chastity of girls was generally strictly observed (as opposed to the Celts), and likewise Tacitus speaks with particular warmth of the inviolability of the marriage union among the Germans. He cites only the wife's adultery as grounds for divorce. But his story leaves many gaps here, and, besides, he too clearly serves as a mirror of virtue for the corrupt Romans. One thing is certain: if the Germans were in their forests these exceptional knights of virtue, then only the slightest contact with the outside world was enough to bring them down to the level of the rest of the average Europeans; the last vestige of strict morals disappeared from the Roman world much faster than the Germanic language. It is enough to read Gregory of Tours. It goes without saying that in the German virgin forests, as in Rome, sophisticated excesses in sensual pleasures could not dominate, and thus the Germans still have a sufficient advantage over the Roman world in this respect, even if we do not attribute to them that abstinence in carnal affairs, which nowhere and never was a general rule for an entire people.

From the tribal system followed the obligation to inherit not only friendly relations, but also hostile relations of the father or relatives; likewise inherited the wergeld, an expiatory fine paid instead of blood feud for murder or injury. The existence of this wergeld, recognized by the past generation as a specifically Germanic institution, has now been proven for hundreds of peoples. This is a general form of mitigation of blood feuds arising from the tribal system. We meet it, as well as the obligatory hospitality, also, by the way, among the American Indians; description of the customs of hospitality in Tacitus ("Germany", ch. 21) coincides almost to the smallest detail with Morgan's story about the hospitality of his Indians.

The heated and endless debate about whether the Germans of the time of Tacitus had already finally divided their fields or not, and how to understand the places related to this, now belongs to the past. After it was proved that almost all peoples had joint cultivation of arable land by the clan, and later by communist family communities, which, according to Caesar, were still among the Suebi, and that this order was replaced by the distribution of land between individual families with periodic new redistributions of this land, after it has been established that this periodic redistribution of arable land has been preserved in places in Germany itself to this day, it is hardly worth even mentioning it. If the Germans, in the 150 years separating Caesar's story from Tacitus' testimony, switched from joint cultivation of the land, which Caesar definitely attributes to the Suebi (they have no divided or private arable land at all, he says), to cultivation by individual families with an annual redistribution of land, then this is really significant progress; the transition from joint cultivation of the land to full private ownership of the land in such a short period of time and without any outside interference seems simply impossible. I read, therefore, in Tacitus only what he succinctly says: they change (or redistribute anew) the cultivated land every year, and at the same time there is still enough common land. This is the stage of agriculture and land use, which exactly corresponds to the then tribal system of the Germans.

I leave the previous paragraph unchanged, as it was in previous editions. During this time, things took a different turn. After Kovalevsky (see above, p. 44) proved the widespread, if not ubiquitous, spread of the patriarchal home community as an intermediate step between the communist family based on mother's right and the modern isolated family, it is no longer a question of how it was in the dispute between Maurer and Weitz - common or private ownership of land, but about what was the form common property. There is no doubt that in the time of Caesar, the Suebi had not only common property, but also joint cultivation of the land by common forces. It will be possible to argue for a long time whether the genus was the economic unit, or whether it was the home community, or some intermediate communist kindred group between them, or, depending on land conditions, all three groups existed. But here Kovalevsky argues that the orders described by Tacitus do not presuppose the existence of a brand or rural community, but a home community; only from this latter, much later, as a result of population growth, a rural community developed.

According to this view, the settlements of the Germans in the territories they occupied in Roman times, as well as in those subsequently taken from the Romans, did not consist of villages, but of large family communities that spanned several generations, occupied an appropriate piece of land for cultivation and used the surrounding wastelands. together with neighbors as a common brand. The passage in Tacitus, where it is said that they change the cultivated land, should then really be understood in the agronomic sense: the community each year plowed a different plot, and left the arable land of the previous year left fallow or completely overgrown. With a sparse population, there was always enough free wastelands, which made any disputes over the possession of land superfluous. Only centuries later, when the number of members of household communities increased so much that, under the then conditions of production, it was no longer possible to conduct a common economy, these communities disintegrated; arable lands and meadows, which had previously been in common ownership, began to be divided according to the already known method between separate households that now arose, at first for a time, later - once and for all, while forests, pastures and water remained common.

For Russia, such a course of development seems to be historically fully proven. As regards Germany, and secondarily the rest of the Germanic countries, it cannot be denied that in many respects this assumption explains the sources better and solves the difficulties more easily than the hitherto prevailing point of view, which pushed back the existence of the rural community back to the time of Tacitus. The oldest documents, such as the Codex Laureshamensis, are in general much better explained by the home community than by the rural stamp community. On the other hand, this explanation, in turn, raises new difficulties and new questions that still need to be resolved. Here only new research can lead to a final decision; I cannot, however, deny the great likelihood of the existence of a home community as an intermediate stage also in Germany, Scandinavia and England.

Whereas with Caesar the Germans were partly just settled on the ground, partly still looking for places of permanent settlement, in the time of Tacitus they already had a whole century of settled life behind them; this was consistent with the undoubted progress in the production of means of subsistence. They live in log houses, they still wear the primitive clothes of the inhabitants of the forests: a coarse woolen cloak, an animal skin; for women and the nobility - linen underwear. Their food consists of milk, meat, wild fruits and, as Pliny adds, oatmeal (still the Celtic national dish in Ireland and Scotland). Their wealth lies in cattle, but of poor breed: bulls and cows are undersized, nondescript, without horns; horses are little ponies and bad steeds. Money was used rarely and little, moreover, only Roman money. They did not make and did not value products of gold and silver, iron was rare and, at least among the tribes living along the Rhine and Danube, it seems that it was almost exclusively imported, and not mined independently. Runic writings (imitation of Greek or Latin letters) were known only as cryptography and served only for religious and magical purposes. It was also customary to sacrifice people. In a word, here before us is a people who have just risen from the middle stage of barbarism to the highest. But while the development of independent metal and textile production among the tribes directly bordering on the Romans was hindered by the ease of importing products of Roman industry, such production, no doubt, was created in the northeast, on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Armaments found in the swamps of Schleswig along with Roman coins of the late 2nd century - a long iron sword, chain mail, a silver helmet, etc. cases when they approach the original Roman models. Migration to the civilized Roman Empire put an end to this original production everywhere except England. What uniformity is found in the emergence and further development of this production, show, for example, bronze clasps; these clasps, found in Burgundy, in Romania, on the shores of the Sea of Azov, could come from the same workshop as the English and Swedish ones, and they are just as undoubtedly of German origin.

The organization of management also corresponds to the highest stage of barbarism. Everywhere there was, according to Tacitus, a council of elders (principes), which decided smaller matters, and prepared more important ones for decision in the popular assembly; the latter, in the lowest rung of barbarism, at least where we know about it among the Americans, exists only for the clan, and not for the tribe or the union of tribes. Elders (principes) are still sharply distinguished from military leaders (duces), just like among the Iroquois. The former already live in part at the expense of honorary offerings from members of the tribe in cattle, grain, etc.; they are chosen, as in America, for the most part from the same family; the transition to paternal law favors, as in Greece and Rome, the gradual transformation of the elective principle into hereditary law and thereby the emergence of a noble family in each clan. This ancient so-called tribal nobility, for the most part, perished during the migration of peoples or shortly after it. Warlords were chosen regardless of origin, solely on the basis of ability. Their power was not great, and they had to influence by their example; Tacitus definitely attributes the actual disciplinary power in the army to the priests. The real power was concentrated in the people's assembly. The king or elder of the tribe presides; the people make their decision: the negative - with a murmur, the affirmative - with exclamations of approval and rattling of weapons. The people's assembly also serves as a court; complaints are addressed here and they are resolved here, death sentences are pronounced here, and death is due only for cowardice, betrayal of one's people and unnatural vices. Within the clans and other divisions, the court also decides everything together under the chairmanship of the elder, who, as in all ancient German legal proceedings, could only lead the process and raise questions; The verdict among the Germans was always and everywhere pronounced by the whole collective.

Since the time of Caesar, alliances of tribes have formed; some of them already had kings; the supreme commander, like the Greeks and Romans, already sought tyrannical power and sometimes achieved it. Such successful usurpers, however, were by no means unlimited rulers; but they were already beginning to break the fetters of the tribal system. While freed slaves generally occupied a subordinate position, since they could not belong to any kind, among the new kings, favorites from their midst often reached high positions, wealth and honor. The same thing happened after the conquest of the Roman Empire with the military leaders who now became kings of large countries. Among the Franks, the king's slaves and freedmen played a large role, first at court and then in the state; most of the new nobility trace their origins to them.

The emergence of royal power was facilitated by one institution - squads. We have already seen among the American Redskins how, next to the tribal system, private associations are created to wage war at their own peril and risk. These private associations have already become permanent alliances with the Germans. A military leader who had gained fame gathered around him a band of prey-hungry young men who owed him personal loyalty, as he did them. He supported and rewarded them, established a certain hierarchy between them; for small campaigns they served him as a detachment of bodyguards and an army always ready for action, for larger ones - a ready officer corps. However weak these squads must have been, and however weak they really turned out to be, for example, later at Odoacer in Italy, nevertheless, in their existence the germ of the decline of the ancient freedom of the people was already lurking, and it was precisely this role that they played during the migration of peoples and after it. . For, in the first place, they favored the rise of royalty; secondly, as Tacitus already notes, they could be kept as an organized whole only through constant wars and robber raids. Robbery has become the goal. If the leader of the squad had nothing to do nearby, he went with his people to other peoples who were at war and could count on prey; German auxiliary troops, who fought in large numbers under the Roman banner even against the Germans themselves, were recruited in part from such squads. The system of military mercenaries - the shame and curse of the Germans - was already here in its original form. After the conquest of the Roman Empire, these warriors of the kings formed, along with the court servants from among the unfree and the Romans, the second of the main components of the later nobility.

Thus, in general, the Germanic tribes uniting into peoples had the same management organization as that which was developed by the Greeks of the heroic era and the Romans of the era of the so-called kings: a popular assembly, a council of tribal elders, a military leader who was already striving for a genuine royal authorities. It was the most developed organization of government that could have been formed under the tribal system; for the highest stage of barbarism, she was exemplary. As soon as the society got out of the framework within which this management organization satisfied its purpose, the tribal system came to an end; it collapsed, its place was taken by the state.

THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE. In connection with the research of Lewis G. Morgan

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

Preface to the fourth edition

I. PREHISTORIC STAGES OF CULTURE
1. Wildness
2. Barbarism
II. FAMILY
III. IROquois GENUS
IV. GREEK ROD
V. Rise of the State of Athens
VI. GENUS AND STATE IN ROME
VII. GENUS OF THE CELTICS AND GERMANS

According to A. Gurevich: “ Archeology forced a new approach to the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Germans. "Germani" is not a self-name, because different tribes called themselves differently. Ancient authors used the term "Germans" to refer to a group of peoples who lived north of the Alps and east of the Rhine. From the point of view of Greek and Roman writers, these are the tribes that are located between the Celts in the west and the Sarmatians in the east. Poor knowledge of their way of life and culture, almost complete ignorance of their language and customs made it impossible for the neighbors of the Germans to give them an ethnic characterization that would have any positive hallmarks, First defined archaeological evidence about the Germans - not earlier than the middle of the 1st millennium BC. e, and only then the "Germans" become archaeologically tangible, but even at this time it is impossible to consider the entire territory of the later settlement of the Germans as a kind of archaeological unity (Mongait, 1974, p. 325; cf.: Die Germanen, 1978, S. 55 ff.) Moreover, a number of tribes, which the ancients attributed to the Germans, apparently, either were not such at all, or were a mixed Celtic-Germanic population. As a kind of reaction to the former nationalist tendency to trace the origin of the Germans to ancient times and trace their continuous autochthonous development since the Mesolithic, scholars are now heard about the uncertainty of the ethnic boundaries that separated the Germans from other peoples. Summing up the difficulties associated with the problem of Germanic ethnogenesis, a prominent West German archaeologist asks: "Did the Germans exist at all?" (Hachmann, 1971, S. 31; Cf. Döbler, 1975)" .

Giving a description of the socio-cultural community of Central and Northern Europe from the Lower Rhine to northern slopes Carpathian Mountains, represented by a variety of archaeological cultures, however, having some common features, and correlated with the "Germany" of ancient authors, M. Schukin wrote:

"Who were the representatives of the third" world "in ethnicity? It is impossible to answer this question unambiguously. When the Romans came to the banks of the Rhine and Danube, they began to call the entire population of the country lying between these rivers the Germans, and the country - Germany or Svevia, after one of the strongest groupings of tribes. But the dialects of the vernacular German language and today are very different. In antiquity, the differences were obviously even more striking. In 1962, two German archaeologists and one linguist published an interesting paper. They managed to show that the territory of one of the groups of Jastorf-Kulturs (which are associated with the early Germans - A.R.) on the right bank of the Rhine coincides with the zone of distribution of toponyms that cannot be explained either from the Celtic or from the Germanic languages. A certain anonymous people "X" lived here, a people "between the Germans and the Celts" ( Hachmann, Kossak, Kuhn 1962). There is reason to believe that there were many more such peoples who spoke some non-preserved dialects of Indo-European or even pre-Indo-European languages, such could be all representatives of the Harpsted and Nienburg groups between the Elbe and the Rhine, and the Celtic population of the Saale-Unstrut-Elbe region, and the group Bodenbach-Podmokly. This approach to the problem, which means the formation of a new "paradigm of thinking" of specialists, was clearly manifested in a series of reports at the 1983 conference in Meiningen, published in 1988 in the collection " early peoples Central Europe". Perhaps the same should be applied to representatives of the Przeworsk and Oksyv cultures, Zarubinets and Poyanesty-Lukashivka, especially since they all arose earlier than the appearance of the Germans as such in the historical arena.

The difference between the Germans and the Gauls in the descriptions of ancient authors was primarily cultural and geographical, and not ethnic. Julius Caesar, who first used this name in a generalized sense, conveyed: “most of the Belgians are Germans by origin, who long ago crossed the Rhine” (Gallic War. II , 4), Tacitus wrote that the Celtic (Gallic) tribes "Trevers and Nervii claim German origin" (Germany. 28), and Strabo previously wrote: "Nervii, also a Germanic tribe, adjoin the Trevers" (Geography. IV , 3, 4). In a triumphal inscription made in Rome in I century and dedicated to the battle with the Celts at Clastia in 222 BC, along with the Gauls-Insubres instead of the Galatians-Gesatians invited by them, which were reported by Polybius (General History. II , 22), the Germans are indicated .

Some peoples, in particular the Cimbri and Teutons, were attributed by some authors to the Celts, for example, Appian (Roman history. IV, 1, 2; X, 1, 4) . He also reported on the origin of the Nervii from the Cimbri and Teutons (Ibid. IV , 1, 4), and Caesar wrote about the origin of the Belgic tribe of Aduatuks from them (Gallic War. II , 29). Others attributed them to the Germans, for example, Tacitus (Germany. 37; History. IV , 73). Plutarch was also inclined to this, at the same time calling them Celto-Scythians (Plutarch. Gaius Marius. 11), while according to his description, their weapons and methods of warfare are characteristic of the Celts (Ibid. 19, 20, 23, 26, 27 ), their clothes and language also turn out to be Gallic (Plutarch. Sertorius. 3).

Strabo attributed the Cimbri to the Celts (Geography. VII , 2, 1), then to the Germans (Ibid. VII , 2, 4). He also noted among the Cimbri the veneration of the cauldron, known among the Celts, and it was on the territory of the Jutland Peninsula, in ancient times called the Cimbri, that the most famous Celtic cult cauldron from Gundestrup was found. Later, Orosius called them "Gallic and Germanic tribes" (History against the pagans. V , 16, 1) or simply by the Gauls (Ibid. V , 16, 15). And Dio Cassius in his "Roman History" always called the Germanic (in the current sense) peoples the Celts, while distinguishing them from the Gauls, while Germany he called only the corresponding Roman provinces on the Rhine .

Describing "the tribe now called Gallic and Galatian" Strabo noted: " I have given this description on the basis of ancient customs, which are still preserved among the Germans to this day. After all, these tribes by nature and by social order not only similar, but even related to each other; they live in neighboring country, shared by the river Ren; most of their regions are similar (although Germany is located to the north), if we compare the southern regions of one country with the southern regions of another, and compare the northern regions with the northern ones ”(Geography. IV, 4, 2).

In turn, turning to Germany, he wrote: “The regions beyond the Rhine, facing east and lying beyond the territory of the Celts, are inhabited by the Germans. The latter differ little from the Celtic tribe: greater wildness, stature and lighter hair; in all other respects they are similar: in physique, manners, and mode of life, they are such as I have described the Celts. Therefore, it seems to me, the Romans also called them "Germans", as if wishing to indicate that they were "true" Galatians. After all, the word germani in the language of the Romans means “authentic” ”(Ibid. VII, 1, 2).

VII. GENUS OF THE CELTICS AND GERMANS

The scope of this work does not allow us to consider in detail the institutions of the tribal system, which still exist today among the most diverse savage and barbarian peoples in a more or less pure form, or the traces of these institutions in the ancient history of the Asiatic civilized peoples. Both are found everywhere. A few examples will suffice. Even before they knew what the genus was, McLennan, who made the most effort to confuse the meaning of this concept, proved its existence and generally correctly described it among the Kalmyks, Circassians, Samoyeds and among the three Indian peoples - Varli , Magars and Manipuri. Recently M. Kovalevsky discovered and described it among the Pshavs, Khevsurs, Svans and other Caucasian tribes. Here we confine ourselves to some brief remarks on the existence of the genus among the Celts and Germans.

The oldest extant Celtic laws show us the race still full of life; in Ireland it lives, at least instinctively, in the minds of the people even now, after the English forcibly destroyed it; in Scotland it was in full bloom as early as the middle of the last century, and here also it was destroyed only by the arms, legislation and courts of the English.

Old Welsh laws, written down many centuries before the English conquest, at the latest in the 11th century, still testify to the presence of the joint cultivation of the land by entire villages, although in the form of only a survival of an earlier common practice as an exception; each family had five acres for self-cultivation; along with this, one plot was worked together and the crop was to be divided. There is no doubt that these rural communities are clans or divisions of clans; the analogy with Ireland and Scotland already proves this, even if a new study of Welsh law, for which I have no time (my excerpts are from 1869), would not directly confirm this. But on the other hand, Welsh sources, and with them Irish ones, directly prove that among the Celts in the 11th century, pair marriage was by no means supplanted by monogamy. In Wales, marriage became indissoluble, or rather irrevocable at the request of one of the parties, only after seven years had elapsed. If up to seven years only three nights were missing, then the spouses could disperse. Then the division of property was carried out: the wife divided, the husband chose his part. Household utensils were divided according to certain, very curious rules. If the marriage was dissolved by the husband, then he had to return to his wife her dowry and some other items; if a wife, she received less. Of the children, the husband received two, the wife - one child, namely the middle one. If the wife, after a divorce, entered into a new marriage, and the first husband wanted to get her again, then she had to follow him, even if she had already set foot on a new marital bed. But if they lived together for seven years, they became husband and wife even if the marriage had not been formalized before. The chastity of girls before marriage was by no means strictly observed or required; the rules related to this are of a very frivolous nature and do not at all correspond to bourgeois morality. If a woman committed adultery, the husband could beat her (one of the three cases when he was allowed to do this, in all the others he was punished for it), but after that he had no right to demand another satisfaction, because

"for the same offense, either expiation or revenge is due, but not both."

The reasons why a wife could demand a divorce without losing anything from her rights in the division of property were very diverse: it was enough for the husband to have bad breath. The redemption money payable to the leader of the tribe or the king for the right of the first night (gobr rnerch, whence the medieval name marcheta, in French - marquette) plays a significant role in the collection of laws. Women enjoyed the right to vote in popular assemblies. Let us add to this that the existence of similar orders has been proved for Ireland; that temporary marriages were also quite common there, and that the wife, on divorce, was provided with well-defined great advantages, even compensation for her work in the household; that the “first wife” met there along with other wives and no distinction was made in the division of the inheritance between married and illegitimate children. Thus we have a picture of pair marriage that makes the current form of marriage in North America seem strict, but in the 11th century this is not surprising in a people who, even in the time of Caesar, lived in group marriage.

In Scotland, the death of the tribal system coincides with the suppression of the rebellion of 1745. It remains to be investigated which link in this system the Scottish clan represents, but that it is such a link is beyond doubt. In the novels of Walter Scott, this clan of the highlands of Scotland stands before us, as if alive. This clan, says Morgan,

"an excellent example of the clan in its organization and in its spirit, a striking example of the power of tribal life over members of the clan ... In their strife and blood feud, in the distribution of territory among clans, in their joint land use, in the loyalty of clan members to the leader and to each other, we we find universally stable features of tribal society. Descent was considered in accordance with paternal right, so that the children of men remained in the clan, while the children of women passed into the clans of their fathers.

But that maternal right formerly dominated Scotland is proved by the fact that, according to Bede, in the royal family of the Picts, inheritance was through the female line. Even the vestige of the punaluan family was preserved by both the Welsh and the Scots until the Middle Ages in the form of the right of the first night, which, if it was not redeemed, could be exercised in relation to each bride by the clan leader or king as the last representative of the former common husbands.

There is no doubt that the Germans, right up to the migration of peoples, were organized into clans. They apparently occupied the territory between the Danube, Repn, Vistula and the northern seas only a few centuries before our era; The resettlement of the Cimbri and Teutons was then still in full swing, and the Suebi settled firmly only in the time of Caesar. Of the latter, Caesar definitely says that they settled in clans and kindred groups (gentibus cognationibusque), and in the mouth of a Roman from gens Julia this word gentibus has a very definite and indisputable meaning. This applied to all Germans; even in the conquered Roman provinces they still settled, apparently in clans. In the "Alemannic Truth" it is confirmed that in the conquered land south of the Danube, the people settled in clans (genealogiae); the concept of genealogia is used here in exactly the same sense as, later, the Marka community or the rural community. Recently, Kovalevsky expressed the view that these genealogiae were large household communities between which the land was divided and from which a rural community only subsequently developed. The same may then apply to fara, an expression which among the Burgundians and Lombards - hence the Gothic and Herminonian, or High German tribe - meant almost, if not quite, the same as the word genealogia in the Alemannic Truth. ". Whether we really have a clan or a domestic community before us is still subject to further research. The monuments of the language leave us open to the question of whether all Germans had a common expression for denoting the genus - and which one. Etymologically Greek genos, Latin gens corresponds to Gothic kuni, Middle High German kunne, and the word is used in the same sense. The time of motherhood is indicated by the fact that the word for woman comes from the same root: Greek gyne, Slavic zena, Gothic qvino, Old Norse kona, kuna. Among the Lombards and Burgundians, as already mentioned, we find the word fara, which Grimm derives from the hypothetical root fisan - to give birth. I would prefer to proceed from a more obvious origin from faran - to travel, roam, return, as designations for some specific part of a nomadic group, consisting, of course, only of relatives - a designation that, during centuries of migration, first east, and then to the west was gradually transferred to the tribal community itself. - Further, Gothic sibja, Anglo-Saxon sib, Old High German sippia, sippa - relatives. Old Norse only has the plural sifjar, relatives; in the singular - only as the name of the goddess Sif. - And, finally, in the "Song of Hildebrand" another expression comes across, exactly in the place where Hildebrand asks Hadubrand:

"Who is your father among the men of the people, or what kind are you?" ("eddo huelihhes cnuosles du sis")

If there was a general Germanic designation for the genus at all, then it obviously sounded like the Gothic kuni; this is evidenced not only by the identity with the corresponding expression in related languages, but also by the fact that the word kuning comes from it - king, which originally denotes the elder of a clan or tribe. The word sibja, relatives, does not seem to be taken into account; at least sifjar means in Old Norse not only blood relatives, but also relatives, that is, it includes members of at least two genera: the word sif itself, therefore, could not be a designation of a genus.

Even more decisive, since this evidence belongs to a later period, after almost 800 years, is one passage from the Old Norse song about the twilight of the gods and the death of the world "Voluspa". In this "Prophecy of the Seer," in which, as Bang and Bugge has now proved, elements of Christianity are also interwoven, in describing the era of general degeneration and corruption preceding the great catastrophe, it says:

Broedhr munu ber|ask ok at bonum verdask, munu systrungar siijumspilla

Systrungr means the son of the mother's sister, and the fact that they, the children of the sisters, renounce mutual consanguinity, seems to the poet an even greater crime than fratricide. This aggravation of the crime is expressed in the word systrungar, which emphasizes kinship on the maternal side, if instead it stood syskma-born - children of brothers and sisters - or syskina-synir - sons of brothers and sisters, then the second line would mean in relation to the first not aggravation , and mitigation. Thus, even in the days of the Vikings, when the "Broadcasting of the Seer" arose, the memory of mother-right has not yet disappeared in Scandinavia. However, in the time of Tacitus, among the Germans, at least among those better known to him, maternal right had already given way to paternal; children inherited from their father, in the absence of children, brothers and uncles from the paternal and maternal sides inherited. The admission of the mother's brother to the inheritance is connected with the preservation of the custom just mentioned, and also proves how new paternal right was still then among the Germans. Traces of maternal law are also found for a long time in the Middle Ages. Even at that time, apparently, they did not really rely on descent from the father, especially among serfs, so when the feudal lord demanded back from some city an escaped serf, then, as, for example, in Augsburg, Basel, Kaiserslautern, serfdom the defendant had to confirm under oath six of his closest blood relatives, and, moreover, exclusively from the maternal side (Maurer, "City", I, p. 381). Another remnant of the recently dead maternal right can be seen in the respect of the Germans for the female sex, which for the Roman was almost incomprehensible. Girls from a noble family were recognized as the most reliable hostages when concluding agreements with the Germans; the thought that their wives and daughters might be taken captive and enslaved is terrible for them and, more than anything else, excites their courage in battle, in a woman they see something sacred and prophetic; they listen to her advice even in the most important matters; thus Veleda, a priestess of the Bructerians on Lippa, was the soul of the whole revolt of the Batavians, during which Civilis, at the head of the Germans and Belgae, shook Roman rule over all Gaul. At home, the dominance of the wife seems to be undeniable; True, all the household chores lie on her, on the old people and children; the husband is hunting, drinking or lounging. This is what Tacitus says, but since he does not say who tills the field, and definitely states that the slaves paid only dues, but did not serve any corvée, it is obvious that a mass of adult men still had to do the little work that agriculture required. . The form of marriage was, as already mentioned above, a pair marriage gradually approaching monogamy. This was not yet strict monogamy, since polygamy of nobles was allowed. The chastity of girls was generally observed strictly (as opposed to the Celts), and equally. Tacitus speaks with special warmth about the inviolability of the marriage union among the Germans. He cites only the wife's adultery as grounds for divorce. But his story leaves many gaps here, and besides, it too obviously serves as a mirror of virtue for the corrupt Romans. One thing is certain: if the Germans were in their forests these exceptional knights of virtue, then only the slightest contact with the outside world was enough to bring them down to the level of the rest of the average Europeans; the last vestige of moral rigor disappeared from the Roman world much faster than the Germanic language. It is enough to read Gregory of Tours. It goes without saying that in the German virgin forests, as in Rome, sophisticated excesses in sensual pleasures could not dominate, and thus the Germans still have a sufficient advantage over the Roman world in this respect, even if we do not attribute to them that abstinence. in carnal affairs, which nowhere and never was a general rule for an entire people. From the tribal system followed the obligation to inherit not only friendly relations, but also hostile relations of the father or relatives; likewise inherited wergeld - an expiatory fine paid instead of blood feud for murder or damage. The existence of this wergeld, recognized by the past generation as a specifically Germanic institution, has now been proven for hundreds of peoples. This is a general form of mitigation of blood feuds arising from the tribal system. We meet it, like the obligatory hospitality, also, by the way, among the American Indians; the description of the customs of hospitality by Tacitus ("Germany", ch. 21) coincides almost to the smallest detail with Morgan's story about the hospitality of his Indians.

The heated and endless dispute about whether the Germans of the time of Tacitus had already finally divided their fields or not, and how to understand the places related to this, now belongs to the past. After it was proved that almost all peoples had a joint cultivation of arable land by the clan, and later by communist family communities, which, according to Caesar, were still among the Suebi, and that this order was replaced by the distribution of land between individual families with periodic new redistributions of this land, after it has been established that this periodic redistribution of arable land has been preserved in places in Germany itself to this day, it is hardly worth even mentioning it. If the Germans, in the 150 years separating Caesar's story from Tacitus' testimony, switched from joint cultivation of the land, which Caesar definitely ascribes to the Suebi (they have no divided or private arable land at all, he says), to cultivation by individual families with an annual redistribution of land, then this is really significant progress; the transition from joint cultivation of the land to full private ownership of the land in such a short period of time and without any outside interference seems simply impossible. I read, therefore, in Tacitus only what he says succinctly: they change (or redistribute) the cultivated land every year, and there is still enough common land left. This is the stage of agriculture and land use, which exactly corresponds to the then tribal system of the Germans. I leave the previous paragraph unchanged, as it was in previous editions. During this time, things took a different turn. After Kovalevsky proved the widespread, if not ubiquitous, spread of the patriarchal home community as an intermediate step between the communist mother-right family and the modern isolated family, it is no longer a question of how it was in the dispute between Maurer and Weitz, - common or private ownership of land, but what was the form of common ownership. There is no doubt that in the time of Caesar, the Suebi had not only common property, but also joint cultivation of the land by common forces. It will be possible to argue for a long time whether the genus was the economic unit, or whether it was the home community, or some intermediate communist kindred group between them, or, depending on land conditions, all three groups existed. But here Kovalevsky argues that the orders described by Tacitus do not presuppose the existence of a brand or rural community, but a home community; only from this latter, much later, as a result of population growth, a rural community developed. According to this view, the settlements of the Germans in the territories they occupied in Roman times, as well as in those subsequently taken from the Romans, did not consist of villages, but of large family communities that spanned several generations, occupied an appropriate piece of land for cultivation and used the surrounding wastelands. together with neighbors as a common brand. The passage in Tacitus, where it is said that they change the cultivated land, should then really be understood in the agronomic sense: the community each year plowed a different plot, and left the arable land of the previous year left fallow or completely overgrown. With a sparse population, there was always enough free wastelands, which made any disputes over the possession of land superfluous. Only centuries later, when the number of members of household communities increased so much that, under the then conditions of production, it was no longer possible to conduct a common economy, these communities disintegrated; arable lands and meadows that had previously been in common ownership began to be divided according to the already well-known method between the now emerging separate households, first for a time, later once and for all, while forests, pastures and water remained common. For Russia, such a course of development seems to be historically fully proven. As regards Germany, and secondarily the rest of the Germanic countries, it cannot be denied that this assumption is in many respects a better explanation of the sources and more easily resolves the difficulties than the hitherto prevailing view, which pushed back the existence of the rural community back to the time of Tacitus. The oldest documents, such as the Codex Laureshamensis, are generally much better explained by the home community than by the rural stamp community. On the other hand, this explanation, in turn, raises new difficulties and new questions that still need to be resolved. Here only new research can lead to a final decision; I cannot, however, deny the great likelihood of the existence of a home community as an intermediate stage also in Germany, Scandinavia and England.

Whereas at Caesar the Germans had only just settled down to the land, and partly were still looking for places of permanent settlement, in the time of Tacitus they already had a whole century of settled life behind them; this was consistent with the undoubted progress in the production of means of subsistence. They live in log houses, they still wear the primitive clothes of the inhabitants of the forests: a coarse woolen cloak, an animal skin; for women and the nobility - linen underwear. Their food consists of milk, meat, wild fruits and, as Pliny adds, oatmeal (still the Celtic national dish in Ireland and Scotland). Their wealth lies in cattle, but of poor breed: bulls and cows are undersized, nondescript, without horns; horses are little ponies and bad steeds. Money was used rarely and little, moreover, only Roman money. They neither made nor valued articles of gold and silver; iron was rare and, at least among the tribes that lived along the Rhine and Danube, it seems to have been almost exclusively imported, and not mined independently. Runic writings (imitation of Greek or Latin letters) were known only as cryptography and served only for religious and magical purposes. It was also customary to sacrifice people. In a word, here before us is a people who have just risen from the middle stage of barbarism to the highest. But while among the tribes immediately bordering on the Romans, the development of independent metal and textile production was hindered by the ease of importing products of Roman industry, such production, no doubt, was created in the northeast, on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Armaments found in the swamps of Schleswig along with Roman coins of the late 2nd century - a long iron sword, chain mail, a silver helmet, etc. cases when they approach the original Roman models. Migration to the civilized Roman Empire put an end to this original production everywhere except England. What uniformity is found in the origin and further development of this production, show, for example, bronze clasps; these fasteners, found in Burgundy, in Romania, on the shores of the Sea of Azov, could come from the same workshop as the English and Swedish ones, and they are just as undoubtedly of German origin. The organization of management also corresponds to the highest stage of barbarism. Everywhere there was, according to Tacitus, a council of elders (prmcipes), which decided lesser matters, and prepared more important ones for decision in the assembly of the people, the latter in the lowest stage of barbarism, at least where we know about it, among the Americans, there is only for a clan, but not for a tribe or an alliance of tribes. The elders (prmcipes) are still sharply distinguished from the military leaders (duces), just like among the Iroquois. The former already live partly on honorary gifts from members of the tribe in cattle, grain, etc., they are chosen, as in America, for the most part from the same family, the transition to paternal right favors, as in Greece and Rome, the gradual transformation of the elective principle into inheritance law and thus the emergence of a noble family in every kind. This ancient so-called tribal nobility, for the most part, perished during the migration of peoples, or shortly after it. Warlords were chosen regardless of origin, solely on the basis of ability. Their power was small, and they had to influence by their example; Tacitus definitely attributes the actual disciplinary power in the army to the priests. The real power was concentrated in the people's assembly. The king or elder of the tribe presides, the people make their decision negative - with a murmur, affirmative - with exclamations of approval and rattling of arms. At the same time, the people's assembly serves as a court, complaints are addressed here and they are resolved here, death sentences are pronounced here, and death is supposed only for cowardice, betrayal of one's people and unnatural vices. Within the clans and other divisions, the court is also decided by all together under the chairmanship of the elder, who, as in all ancient German legal proceedings, could only lead the process and raise questions, the sentence among the Germans was always and everywhere pronounced by the whole team. Since the time of Caesar, alliances of tribes have formed, some of them already had kings, the supreme commander, like the Greeks and Romans, already sought tyrannical power and sometimes achieved it. Such successful usurpers, however, were by no means unlimited rulers, but they were already beginning to break the fetters of the tribal system. While freed slaves generally occupied a subordinate position, since they could not belong to any kind, among the new kings, favorites from their midst often achieved high positions, wealth and honor. The same thing happened after the conquest of the Roman Empire with the military leaders who now became kings of large countries. Among the Franks, the king's slaves and freedmen played a large role, first at court and then in the state; most of the new nobility trace their origins to them.

The emergence of royal power was facilitated by one institution - squads. We have already seen among the American Redskins how, next to the tribal system, private associations are created to wage war at their own peril and risk. These private associations have already become permanent alliances with the Germans. A military leader who had gained fame gathered around him a band of prey-hungry young men who owed him personal loyalty, as he did them. He supported and rewarded them, established a certain hierarchy between them, for small campaigns they served him as a detachment of bodyguards and an army always ready to march, for larger ones - as a ready officer corps. However weak these squads must have been, and however weak they actually turned out to be, for example, later at Odoacer in Italy, nevertheless, in their existence the germ of the decline of the ancient freedom of the people was already lurking, and it was precisely this role that they played during the migration of peoples and after it. . For, in the first place, they favored the rise of royalty; secondly, as Tacitus already notes, they could be kept as an organized whole only through constant wars and robber raids. Robbery became the goal. If the leader of the squad had nothing to do nearby, he went with his people to other peoples who were at war and could count on prey, the German auxiliary troops, who fought in large numbers under the Roman banner even against the Germans themselves, were recruited partly from such squads. The system of military mercenaries - the shame and curse of the Germans - was already here in its original form. After the conquest of the Roman Empire, these warriors of the kings formed, along with the court servants from among the not free and the Romans, the second of the main components of the later nobility. Thus, in general, among the Germanic tribes uniting into peoples, there was the same organization of government as that which was developed among the Greeks of the heroic era and among the Romans of the era of the so-called kings - a popular assembly, a council of tribal elders, a military leader who already aspired to genuine royal power. . It was the most developed organization of government that could ever have developed under the tribal system; for the highest stage of barbarism, it was exemplary. As soon as the society got out of the framework within which this management organization satisfied its purpose, the tribal system came to an end, it collapsed, and the state took its place.

VII. GENUS OF THE CELTICS AND GERMANS

The scope of the present work does not allow us to consider in detail the institutions of the tribal system that still exist today among the most diverse savage and barbarian peoples in a more or less pure form, or the traces of these institutions in the ancient history of the Asian civilized peoples. (* 89) Both are found everywhere. A few examples will suffice. Even before they knew what the genus was, McLennan, who made the most effort to confuse the meaning of this concept, proved its existence and generally correctly described it among the Kalmyks, Circassians, Samoyeds (* 90) and three Indian peoples - Varli, Magars and Manipuri. Recently M. Kovalevsky discovered and described it among the Pshavs, Khevsurs, Svans and other Caucasian tribes. Here we confine ourselves to some brief remarks on the existence of the genus among the Celts and Germans.

The oldest extant Celtic laws show us the race still full of life; in Ireland it lives, at least instinctively, in the minds of the people even now, after the English forcibly destroyed it; in Scotland it was in full bloom as early as the middle of the last century, and here also it was destroyed only by the arms, legislation and courts of the English.

"for the same offense, either expiation or revenge is due, but not both."

The reasons why a wife could demand a divorce without losing anything from her rights in the division of property were very diverse: it was enough for the husband to have bad breath. The redemption money payable to the leader of the tribe or the king for the right of the first night (gobr rnerch, whence the medieval name marcheta, in French - marquette) plays a significant role in the collection of laws. Women enjoyed the right to vote in popular assemblies. Let us add to this that the existence of similar orders has been proved for Ireland; that temporary marriages were also quite common there, and that the wife, on divorce, was provided with well-defined great advantages, even compensation for her work in the household; that the “first wife” met there along with other wives and no distinction was made in the division of the inheritance between married and illegitimate children. Thus we have a picture of pair marriage that makes the current form of marriage in North America seem strict, but in the 11th century this is not surprising in a people who, even in the time of Caesar, lived in group marriage.

"an excellent example of the clan in its organization and in its spirit, a striking example of the power of clan life over members of the clan .. In their strife and in their blood feud, in the distribution of territory among clans, in their joint land use, in the loyalty of clan members to the leader and to each other we find universally stable features of tribal society. Descent was considered in accordance with paternal right, so that the children of men remained in the clan, while the children of women passed into the clans of their fathers.

There is no doubt that the Germans, right up to the migration of peoples, were organized into clans. They apparently occupied the territory between the Danube, Repn, Vistula and the northern seas only a few centuries before our era; The resettlement of the Cimbri and Teutons was then still in full swing, and the Suebi settled firmly only in the time of Caesar. Of the latter, Caesar definitely says that they settled in clans and kindred groups (gentibus cognationibusque), and in the mouth of the Roman from gens Julia (*96) this word gentibus has a quite definite and indisputable meaning. This applied to all Germans; even in the conquered Roman provinces they still settled, apparently in clans. In the "Alemannic Truth" it is confirmed that in the conquered land south of the Danube, the people settled in clans (genealogiae); the concept of genealogia is used here in exactly the same sense as later the brand community or rural community. . The same may then apply to fara, an expression which among the Burgundians and Lombards - hence the Gothic and Herminonian, or High German tribe - meant almost, if not quite, the same as the word genealogia in the Alemannic Truth. ". Whether we really have a clan or a domestic community before us is still subject to further research. The monuments of the language leave us open to the question of whether all Germans had a common expression for denoting the genus - and which one. Etymologically Greek genos, Latin gens corresponds to Gothic kuni, Middle High German kunne, and the word is used in the same sense. The time of motherhood is indicated by the fact that the word for woman comes from the same root: Greek gyne, Slavic zena, Gothic qvino, Old Norse kona, kuna. Among the Lombards and Burgundians, as already mentioned, we find the word fara, which Grimm derives from the hypothetical root fisan - to give birth. I would prefer to proceed from a more obvious origin from faran - to travel, (*98) to roam, to return, as denoting a certain part of a nomadic group, consisting, of course, only of relatives - a designation that, during centuries of migration, first to the east , and then to the west it was gradually transferred to the tribal community itself. - Further, Gothic sibja, Anglo-Saxon sib, Old High German sippia, sippa - relatives. (*99) Old Norse only has the plural sifjar - relatives; in the singular - only as the name of the goddess Sif. (* 100) - And, finally, in the "Song of Hildebrand" another expression comes across, exactly in the place where Hildebrand asks Hadubrand:

"Who is your father among the men of the people, or what kind are you?" ("eddo huelihhes cnuosles du sis")

If there was a general Germanic designation for the genus at all, then it obviously sounded like the Gothic kuni; this is evidenced not only by the identity with the corresponding expression in related languages, but also by the fact that the word kuning - king, (*101) which originally denotes the elder of a clan or tribe, comes from it. The word sibja, relatives, does not seem to be taken into account; at least sifjar means in Old Norse not only blood relatives, but also relatives, that is, it includes members of at least two genera: the word sif itself, therefore, could not be a designation of a genus.

Even more decisive, since this evidence belongs to a later period, after almost 800 years, is one passage from the Old Norse song about the twilight of the gods and the death of the world "Voluspa". In this "Prophecy of the Seer," in which, as Bang and Bugge has now proved, elements of Christianity are also interwoven, in describing the era of general degeneration and corruption preceding the great catastrophe, it says:

Broedhr munu ber|ask ok at bonum verdask, munu systrungar siijumspilla

Systrungr means the son of the mother's sister, and the fact that they, the children of the sisters, renounce mutual consanguinity, seems to the poet an even greater crime than fratricide. This aggravation of the crime is expressed in the word systrungar, which emphasizes kinship on the maternal side, if instead it stood syskma-born - children of brothers and sisters - or syskina-synir - sons of brothers and sisters, then the second line would mean in relation to the first not aggravation , and mitigation. Thus, even in the days of the Vikings, when the "Broadcasting of the Seer" arose, the memory of mother-right has not yet disappeared in Scandinavia. However, in the time of Tacitus, among the Germans, at least among those better known to him, (* 104) maternal right had already given way to paternal; children inherited from their father, in the absence of children, brothers and uncles from the paternal and maternal sides inherited. The admission of the mother's brother to the inheritance is connected with the preservation of the custom just mentioned, and also proves how new paternal right was still then among the Germans. Traces of maternal law are also found for a long time in the Middle Ages. Even at that time, apparently, they did not really rely on descent from the father, especially among serfs, so when the feudal lord demanded back from some city an escaped serf, then, as, for example, in Augsburg, Basel, Kaiserslautern, serfdom the defendant had to confirm under oath six of his closest blood relatives, and, moreover, exclusively from the maternal side (Maurer, "City", I, p. 381). Another remnant of the recently dead maternal right can be seen in the respect of the Germans for the female sex, which for the Roman was almost incomprehensible. Girls from a noble family were recognized as the most reliable hostages when concluding agreements with the Germans; the thought that their wives and daughters might be taken captive and enslaved is terrible for them and, more than anything else, excites their courage in battle, in a woman they see something sacred and prophetic; they listen to her advice even in the most important matters; thus Veleda, a priestess of the Bructerians on Lippa, was the soul of the whole revolt of the Batavians, during which Civilis, at the head of the Germans and Belgae, shook Roman rule over all Gaul. At home, the dominance of the wife seems to be undeniable; True, all the household chores lie on her, on the old people and children; the husband is hunting, drinking or lounging. This is what Tacitus says, but since he does not say who tills the field, and definitely states that the slaves paid only dues, but did not serve any corvée, it is obvious that a mass of adult men still had to do the little work that agriculture required. . The form of marriage was, as already mentioned above, a pair marriage gradually approaching monogamy. This was not yet strict monogamy, since polygamy of nobles was allowed. The chastity of girls was generally observed strictly (as opposed to the Celts), and equally. Tacitus speaks with special warmth about the inviolability of the marriage union among the Germans. He cites only the wife's adultery as grounds for divorce. But his story leaves many gaps here, and besides, it too obviously serves as a mirror of virtue for the corrupt Romans. One thing is certain: if the Germans were in their forests these exceptional knights of virtue, then only the slightest contact with the outside world was enough to bring them down to the level of the rest of the average Europeans; the last vestige of moral rigor disappeared from the Roman world much faster than the Germanic language. It is enough to read Gregory of Tours. It goes without saying that in the German virgin forests, as in Rome, sophisticated excesses in sensual pleasures could not dominate, and thus the Germans still have a sufficient advantage over the Roman world in this respect, even if we do not attribute to them that abstinence. in carnal affairs, which nowhere and never was a general rule for an entire people. From the tribal system followed the obligation to inherit not only friendly relations, but also hostile relations of the father or relatives; likewise inherited wergeld - an expiatory fine paid instead of blood feud for murder or damage. The existence of this wergeld, recognized by the past generation as a specifically Germanic institution, has now been proven for hundreds of peoples. This is a general form of mitigation of blood feuds arising from the tribal system. We meet it, like the obligatory hospitality, also, by the way, among the American Indians; the description of the customs of hospitality by Tacitus ("Germany", ch. 21) coincides almost to the smallest detail with Morgan's story about the hospitality of his Indians.

The heated and endless dispute about whether the Germans of the time of Tacitus had already finally divided their fields or not, and how to understand the places related to this, now belongs to the past. After it was proved that almost all peoples had a joint cultivation of arable land by the clan, and later by communist family communities, which, according to Caesar, were still among the Suebi, and that this order was replaced by the distribution of land between individual families with periodic new redistributions of this land, after it has been established that this periodic redistribution of arable land has been preserved in places in Germany itself to this day, it is hardly worth even mentioning it. If the Germans, in the 150 years separating Caesar's story from Tacitus' testimony, switched from joint cultivation of the land, which Caesar definitely ascribes to the Suebi (they have no divided or private arable land at all, he says), to cultivation by individual families with an annual redistribution of land, then this is really significant progress; the transition from joint cultivation of the land to full private ownership of the land in such a short period of time and without any outside interference seems simply impossible. I read, therefore, in Tacitus only what he says succinctly: they change (or redistribute) the cultivated land every year, and there is still enough common land left. This is the stage of agriculture and land use, which exactly corresponds to the then tribal system of the Germans. (* 105) I leave the previous paragraph unchanged, as it was in previous editions. During this time, things took a different turn. After Kovalevsky proved the widespread, if not ubiquitous, spread of the patriarchal home community as an intermediate step between the communist mother-right family and the modern isolated family, it is no longer a question of how it was in the dispute between Maurer and Weitz, - common or private ownership of land, but what was the form of common ownership. There is no doubt that in the time of Caesar, the Suebi had not only common property, but also joint cultivation of the land by common forces. It will be possible to argue for a long time whether the genus was the economic unit, or whether it was the home community, or some intermediate communist kindred group between them, or, depending on land conditions, all three groups existed. But here Kovalevsky argues that the orders described by Tacitus do not presuppose the existence of a brand or rural community, but a home community; only from this latter, much later, as a result of population growth, a rural community developed. According to this view, the settlements of the Germans in the territories they occupied in Roman times, as well as in those subsequently taken from the Romans, did not consist of villages, but of large family communities that spanned several generations, occupied an appropriate piece of land for cultivation and used the surrounding wastelands. together with neighbors as a common brand. The passage in Tacitus, where it is said that they change the cultivated land, should then really be understood in the agronomic sense: the community each year plowed a different plot, and left the arable land of the previous year left fallow or completely overgrown. With a sparse population, there was always enough free wastelands, which made any disputes over the possession of land superfluous. Only centuries later, when the number of members of household communities increased so much that, under the then conditions of production, it was no longer possible to conduct a common economy, these communities disintegrated; arable lands and meadows that had previously been in common ownership began to be divided according to the already well-known method between the now emerging separate households, first for a time, later once and for all, while forests, pastures and water remained common. For Russia, such a course of development seems to be historically fully proven. As regards Germany, and secondarily the rest of the Germanic countries, it cannot be denied that this assumption is in many respects a better explanation of the sources and more easily resolves the difficulties than the hitherto prevailing view, which pushed back the existence of the rural community back to the time of Tacitus. The oldest documents, such as the Codex Laureshamensis, are generally much better explained by the home community than by the rural stamp community. On the other hand, this explanation, in turn, raises new difficulties and new questions that still need to be resolved. Here only new research can lead to a final decision; I cannot, however, deny the great likelihood of the existence of a home community as an intermediate stage also in Germany, Scandinavia and England.

The emergence of royal power was facilitated by one institution - squads. We have already seen among the American Redskins how, next to the tribal system, private associations are created to wage war at their own peril and risk. These private associations have already become permanent alliances with the Germans. A military leader who had gained fame gathered around him a band of prey-hungry young men who owed him personal loyalty, as he did them. He supported and rewarded them, established a certain hierarchy between them, for small campaigns they served him as a detachment of bodyguards and an army always ready to march, for larger ones - as a ready officer corps. However weak these squads must have been, and however weak they actually turned out to be, for example, later at Odoacer in Italy, nevertheless, in their existence the germ of the decline of the ancient freedom of the people was already lurking, and it was precisely this role that they played during the migration of peoples and after it. . For, in the first place, they favored the rise of royalty; secondly, as Tacitus already notes, they could be kept as an organized whole only through constant wars and robber raids. Robbery became the goal. If the leader of the squad had nothing to do nearby, he went with his people to other peoples who were at war and could count on prey, the German auxiliary troops, who fought in large numbers under the Roman banner even against the Germans themselves, were recruited partly from such squads. The system of military mercenaries - the shame and curse of the Germans - was already here in its original form. After the conquest of the Roman Empire, these warriors of the kings formed, along with the court servants from among the not free and the Romans, the second of the main components of the later nobility. Thus, in general, among the Germanic tribes uniting into peoples, there was the same organization of government as that which was developed among the Greeks of the heroic era and among the Romans of the era of the so-called kings - a popular assembly, a council of tribal elders, a military leader who already aspired to genuine royal power. . It was the most developed organization of government that could ever have developed under the tribal system; for the highest stage of barbarism, it was exemplary. As soon as the society got out of the framework within which this management organization satisfied its purpose, the tribal system came to an end, it collapsed, and the state took its place.