Mark Moot

The ancient German mark was divided into the village, the arable lands, and the common lands; the arable lands were moot was transacted all the business that arose out of the system of common cultivation and out of the employment of common rights. Taylor, Jurispr. 199. But Maitland (Domesday Book 354) points out that the German village was not a mark community. The mark lands belonged to no village. In later days some large piece of the wild agricultural territory was found to be under the control of a “mark-community,” whose members dwell here and there in many different villages and exercised rights over the land that belonged to no village but constituted the mark. Traces of what may perhaps have become the “mark system” may perhaps be found in England.