"Collective property or private property?" as
discussed between Maurer and Waitz, but "What was the form of that
collective property?" Not alone is there no doubt whatever, that the
Suebi were the collective owners of their land at Cesar's time, but also
that they tilled the soil collectively. The questions, whether their
economic unit was the gens, or the household, or an intermediate
communistic group, or whether all three of these groups existed at the
same time as a result of different local conditions, may remain
undecided for a long while yet. Kovalevsky maintains that the conditions
described by Tacitus were not founded on the mark or village community,
but on the household community, which developed much later into the
village community by the growth of the population.

Hence the settlements of the Germans on the territory they occupied at
the time of the Romans, and on territory later taken by them from the
Romans, would not have consisted of villages, but of large co-operative
families comprising several generations, who cultivated a sufficient
piece of land and used the surrounding wild land in common with their
neighbors. If this was the case, then the passage in Tacitus regarding
the changing of the cultivated land would indeed have an agronomic
meaning, viz., that the co-operative household cultivated a different
piece of land every year, and the land cultivated during the previous
year was left untilled or entirely abandoned. The scarcity of the
population would have left enough spare wild lands to make all dispute
about land unnecessary. Only after the lapse of centuries, when the
members of the family had increased so that the collective cultivation
became incompatible with the prevailing conditions of production, the
household communities were dissolved. The former common fields and
meadows were then divided in the well-known manner among the various
individual families that had now formed. The division of farm lands was
first periodical, but later final, while forest, pasture and
watercourses remained common property.

It seems that this process of development has been fully established for
Russia by historical investigation. As for Germany and, in the second
place, for other German countries, it cannot be denied that this view
affords in many instances a better interpretation of historical
authorities and a readier solution of difficulties than the idea of
tracing the village community to the time