Its master was supreme, and from this feature, continually preserved and maintained to this daj', comes the familiar principle of English and American law, that "every man's house is his castle." These groups of families, or societies, with their Leader, or Headman, were often involved in disputes, with neighboring societies and their families and Headmen. And to this fact of native Teutonic quarrelsomeness the German investigators and writers ascribe the change (which took place gradually) that evolved the manor from the Mark. " One community conquers another and the spoil of war is either the common Mark (the part of the district cultivated in common), or the waste [the uncultivated part), of the worsted community. Either the conquerors appropriate and colonize the part of the waste so taken, or they take the whole domain and restore it to be held in dependence on the victor society." ^ This was the origin of the idea of suzerainty or lordship. Another cause of the change from this Mark system to the manorial system, the German writers say, was the fact, that these Teutonic village societies, "though their organization can only be described as democratic, appear, nevertheless, to have

< Hist. Inst. 77.

5 Von Slaurer cited by Jtaiue, Vill. Com. 10, with approval, ejlaine's Vill. Com. 143.

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

generally had an abiding tradition that in some one family, or in some families, the blood which ran in the veins of all the freemen was purest; probably because the direct descent of such family, or families, from a common ancestor was remembered or believed in.