The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 20. Frederic Seebohm
The subject of English village communities was specially studied by Frederic Seebohm, who died in 1912. So far back as 1867, he had first become known to students of English history by an attractive volume entitled The Oxford Reformers of 1498—Colet, Erasmus and More—which renders full justice to Colet’s share in the renascence movement on the basis of the letters of his whole-hearted friend and admirer Erasmus. But the researches which, at a later date, he carried on during his long residence in Hertfordshire, and of which the first published result was his well-known book The English Village Community (1882), had reference to problems of early land-tenure and of the social system evolved from it which largely occupied the minds of medievalists in our own and other countries, and which represent a reaction from the theory of the Germanic origin of the village community to that of its primary indebtedness to Roman influence. Seebohm’s investigations were not confined to English, but afterwards extended, in particular, to Welsh, conditions of life.