“the town of the Harlings,” etc.,[5] we have unimpeachable evidence of a time when the town was regarded as the dwelling-place of a clan.  Indeed, the comparative rarity of the word mark in English laws, charters, and local names (to which Professor Stubbs alludes) may be due to the fact that the word town has precisely the same meaning. Mark means originally the belt of waste land encircling the village, and secondarily the village with its periphery. Town means originally a hedge or enclosure, and secondarily the spot that is enclosed:  the modern German zaun, a “hedge,” preserves the original meaning.  But traces of the mark in England are not found in etymology alone.  I have already alluded to the origin of the “common” in English towns.  What is still more important is that in some parts of England cultivation in common has continued until quite recently.  The local legislation of the mark appears in the tunscipesmot,—­a word which is simply Old-English for “town-meeting.”  In the shires where the Danes acquired a firm foothold, the township was often called a “by”; and it had the power of enacting its own “by-laws” or town-laws, as New England townships have to-day.  But above all, the assembly of the markmen has left vestiges of itself in the constitution of the parish and the manor.  The mark or township, transformed by the process of feudalization, becomes the manor.  The process of feudalization, throughout western Europe in general, was no doubt begun by the institution of Benefices, or “grants of Roman provincial land by the chieftains of the” Teutonic “tribes which overran the Roman Empire; such grants being conferred on their associates upon certain conditions, of which the commonest was military service.” [6] The feudal regime naturally reached its most complete development in France, which affords the most perfect example of a Roman territory overrun and permanently held in possession by Teutonic conquerors.  Other causes assisted the process, the most potent perhaps being the chaotic condition of European society during the break-up of the Carolingian Empire and the Scandinavian and Hungarian invasions.  Land was better protected when held of a powerful chieftain than when held in one’s own right; and hence the practice of commendation, by which free allodial proprietors were transformed into the tenants of a lord, became fashionable and was gradually extended to all kinds of estates.  In England the effects of feudalization were different from what they were in France, but the process was still carried very far, especially under the Norman kings.  The theory grew up that all the public land in the kingdom was the king’s waste, and that all landholders were the king’s tenants.  Similarly in every township the common land was the lord’s waste and the landholders were the lord’s tenants.  Thus the township became transformed into the manor.  Yet even by such a change as this the townsmen or tenants of the manor did not in