hts in England,
and by the general tone of manners.

Till the reign of Charlemagne there were no towns in Germany, except a
few that had been erected on the Rhine and Danube by the Romans. A house
with its stables and farm-buildings, surrounded by a hedge or enclosure,
was called a court, or, as we find it in our law-books, a curtilage; the
toft or homestead of a more genuine English dialect. One of these, with
the adjacent domain of arable fields and woods, had the name of a villa
or manse. Several manses composed a march; and several marches formed a
pagus or district.[558] From these elements in the progress of
population arose villages and towns. In France undoubtedly there were
always cities of some importance. Country parishes contained several
manses or farms of arable land, around a common pasture, where every one
was bound by custom to feed his cattle.[559]

[Sidenote: of internal trade;]

The condition even of internal trade was hardly preferable to that of
agriculture. There is not a vestige perhaps to be discovered for several
centuries of any considerable manufacture; I mean, of working up
articles of common utility to an extent beyond what the necessities of
an adjacent district required.[560] Rich men kept domestic artisans
among their servants; even kings, in the ninth century, had their
clothes made by the women upon their farms;[561] but the peasantry must
have been supplied with garments and implements of labour by purchase;
and every town, it cannot be doubted, had its weaver, its smith, and its
currier. But there were almost insuperable impediments to any extended
traffic--the insecurity of moveable wealth, and difficulty of
accumulating it; the ignorance of mutual wants; the peril of robbery in
conveying merchandise, and the certainty of extortion. In the domains of
every lord a toll was to be paid in passing his bridge, or along his
highway, or at his market.[562] These customs, equitable and necessary
in their principle, became in practice oppressive, because they were
arbitrary, and renewed in every petty territory which the road might
intersect. Several of Charlemagne's capitularies repeat complaints of
these exactions, and endeavour to abolish such tolls as were not founded
on prescription.[563] One of them rather amusingly illustrates the
modesty and moderation of the landholders. It is enacted that no one
shall be compelled to go out of his way in order to pay toll at a
particular bridge,