Teutonic lands as the _hundred_, in Athens as the [Greek: _phratria_] or
_brotherhood_, in Rome as the _curia_. Yet alongside of the Roman group
called the _curia_ there is a group whose name, the _century_, exactly
translates the name of the Teutonic group; and, as Mr. Freeman says, it
is difficult to believe that the Roman _century_ did not at the outset
in some way correspond to the Teutonic _hundred_ as a stage in political
organization. But both these terms, as we know them in history, are
survivals from some prehistoric state of things; and whether they were
originally applied to a hundred of houses, or of families, or of
warriors, we do not know.[8] M. Geffroy, in his interesting essay on the
Germania of Tacitus, suggests that the term _canton_ may have a similar
origin.[9] The outlines of these primitive groups are, however, more
obscure than those of the more primitive mark, because in most cases
they have been either crossed and effaced or at any rate diminished in
importance by the more highly compounded groups which came next in order
of formation. Next above the _hundred_, in order of composition, comes
the group known in ancient Italy as the_pagus_, in Attika perhaps as the
_deme_, in Germany and at first in England as the _gau_ or _ga_, at a
later date in England as the _shire_. Whatever its name, this group
answers to the _tribe_ regarded as settled upon a certain determinate
territory. Just as in the earlier nomadic life the aggregation of clans
makes ultimately the tribe, so in the more advanced agricultural life of
our Aryan ancestors the aggregation of marks or village-communities
makes ultimately the _gau_ or _shire_. Properly speaking, the name
_shire_ is descriptive of division and not of aggregation; but this term
came into use in England after the historic order of formation had been
forgotten, and when the _shire_ was looked upon as a _piece_ of some
larger whole, such as the kingdom of Mercia or Wessex. Historically,
however, the _shire_ was not made, like the _departments_ of modern
France, by the division of the kingdom for administrative purposes, but
the kingdom was made by the union of shires that were previously
autonomous. In the primitive process of aggregation, the _shire_ or
_gau_, governed by its _witenagemote_ or "meeting of wise men," and by
its chief magistrate who was called _ealdorman_ in time of peace and
_heretoga_, "army-leader," _dux_, or _duke_, in time of war,--the
_shire_, I say, in this form, is the largest and most complex political
body we find previous to the formation of kingdoms and nations. But in
saying this, we have already passed beyond the point at which we can
include in the same general formula the process of political development
in Teutonic countries on the one hand and in Greece and Rome on the
other. Up as far as the formation of the tribe, territorially regarded,
the parallelism is preserved; but at this point there begins an
all-important divergence. In the looser and more diffused society of the
rural Teutons, the tribe is spread over a shire, and the aggregation of
shires makes a kingdom, embracing cities, towns, and rural districts
held together by similar bonds of relationship to the central governing
power. But in the society of the old Greeks and Italians, the
aggregation of tribes, crowded together on fortified hill-tops, makes
the _Ancient City_,--a very different thing, indeed, from the modern
city of later-Roman or Teutonic foundation. Let us consider, for a
moment, the difference.
Sir Henry Maine tells us that in Hindustan nearly all the great towns
and cities have arisen either from the simple expansion or from the
expansion and coalescence of primitive village-communities; and such as
have not arisen in this way, including some of the greatest of Indian
cities, have grown up about the intrenched camps of the Mogul
emperors.[10] The case has been just the same in modern Europe. Some
famous cities of England and Germany--such as Chester and Lincoln,