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almost as many traces of joint-ownership and common cultivation as the countries of the North of the Continent; but our interest culminates, I think, when we find that these primitive European tenures and this primitive European tillage constitute the actual working system of the Indian Village-Communities, and that they determine the whole course of Anglo-Indian administration."* In another place this learned English jurist tells us, "The most distinguished public servants of the last century "have left much on record which implies an opinion that no ownership of Indian land was discoverable, except that of the Village-Communities, subject to the dominion of the State."t

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We are told of these Communities, as they were found existing in India, that the Headman or council of village elders (this latter always bearing "a name which recalls its ancient constitution of Five persons") who ruled them did not command but merely declared what had always been done, for custom with them was omnipotent and inexorable. Thus any one who had been aggrieved did not appeal to the authorities on the ground of an individual wrong, but of the disturbance of the order of the entire community. Disputes of a civil nature came before the village elders, but criminal law was left to trial and execution by the individuals wronged, who with their own hands avenged manslaughter, murder, and adultery in the case of a wife by the punishment of death. Each farmer had his portion allotted to him by the village, which he cultivated himself with the aid of his sons and slaves; but he could not cultivate as he pleased. He must sow the same crop as the rest of the community. There was a periodical redistribution of the several holdings. The system was that of "shifting severalties," not the separate perpetual holding, much less the absolute power to alienate any part of the soil. "The description," says Sir Henry Sumner Maine, "given by Maurer of the Teutonic Mark of the township as his researches have shown it to him might here again pass for an account, so far as it goes, of an Indian village." To which I may add that both the former Indian village and the Teutonic Mark answer in all this to the present Palestine Village-Community, which is evidently nothing else but the ancient Mark surviving to this hour in a still more ancient and perfect form.

Julius Faucher of Berlin, in his paper on Systems of Land

* Village-Communities in the East and West, pp. 61, 62.

+ Ibid., p. 154.

Tenure in Various Countries, says that the ancient form of tenure and tillage in Russia "was that of the joint-husbandry of a whole village. The village not the family was the social unit. Supplanting the family for purposes of colonisation, the village, by necessity partook to a certain extent of the character of a family. It stood under patriarchal rule. Movable property alone was individual, immovable, the land at least, was common. With the alien not belonging to the village, not the individual, the village only has to do. The village always had a Mother-village, and the Mother-village again had a Mother-village, and so on. The name of Mothervillage in general, or of Mother-village to another village is still attached to many Russian towns and villages."*

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Sir Henry Sumner Maine tells us that "there appears to be no country inhabited by an Aryan race in which traces do not remain of the ancient periodical redistribution."† In England he tells us this prevails more or less in all parts, but more abundantly in some counties than in others. These lands are known by various names. "When the soil is arable, they are most usually called 'common,' 'commonable,' or 'open' fields, or sometimes simply 'intermixed' lands. When the lands are in grass, they are sometimes known as lot meadows,' sometimes as lammas lands,' though the last expression is occasionally used of arable soil.... The several shares in the arable fields, sometimes, but very rarely, shift from one owner to another in each successive year; but this is frequently the rule with the meadows, which, when they are themselves in a state of severalty, are often distributed once a year by casting lots amongst the persons entitled to appropriate and enclose them, or else change from one possessor to another in the order of the names of persons or tenements on a roll. . . . Common fields and common meadows are still plentiful on all sides of us,” though in the last 170 years vast numbers of such commonable fields have been enclosed, especially since the Common Fields Enclosure Act passed in 1836.§

Mac

* Systems of Land Tenure in Many Lands, pp. 362, 363. millan & Co., 1871. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures certain dependent villages are called "the daughters of "others, which are spoken of as feminine, and therefore as the "mothers," "mother-cities," or "mother-villages" of these smaller dependent places. Thus we read of “Ekron and her daughters (¶).” (Joshua xv. 45. See also Joshua xv. 47; xvii. 11; Judges i. 27; xi. 26; &c.)

+ Village-Communities in the East and West, p. 82.

Ibid., pp. 85, 86, 88.

Nearly 4,000 enclosure Acts were passed between 1760 and 1844!

Mr. William Marshall, a voluminous writer on agriculture. between 1770 and 1820, who has left an account of the state of cultivation in almost every English county," speaks very plainly to this effect in a number of his works. As summed up by Nasse of Bonn, his statements declare that in his time, only some eighty years back, "in almost all parts of the country, in the Midland and Eastern Counties particularly, but also in the West-in Wiltshire for example-in the South, as in Surrey, in the North, as in Yorkshire, there are extensive open and common fields. Out of 316 parishes in Northamptonshire, 89 are in this condition; more than a 100 in Oxfordshire; about 50,000 acres in Warwickshire; in Berkshire, half the county; more than half of Wiltshire; in Huntingdonshire, out of a total area of 240,000 acres, 130,000 were commonable meadows, commons, and common fields."*. Some of these common fields were so extensive that the pasturage on the dividing balks of turf, which were not more than 3 yards wide, was estimated in one case at 80 acres. Indeed our words "commonalty" and "commons," as in "House of Commons," and in the expression "Commons of the Realm," and "yeoman" from the German gemein, "common," doubtless owe their derivation to a body of peasant proprietors having real property in common, that is, the dwellers in Village-Communities, who formed originally the mass of men in all lands.

Writing four years later in 1875, Sir Henry Sumner Maine alludes to further corroborative evidence of the universal existence in primitive times of related Village-Communities holding the land in common with a periodical redistribution, and that even amongst races other than Aryan. He says, "We at length know something concerning the beginnings of the great institution of Property in Land. The collective ownership of the soil by groups of men either in fact united by blood-relationship, or believing or assuming that they are so united, is now entitled to take rank as an ascertained primitive phenomenon, once universally characterising those communities of mankind between whose civilisation and our own there is any distinct connection or analogy. evidence has been found on all sides of us, dimly seen and verifiable with difficulty in countries which have undergone the enormous pressure of the Roman Empire, or which have

The

* Ueber die mittelalterliche Feldgemeinschaft und die Eingehungen des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts in England, by Professor E. Nasse, Bonn,

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been strongly affected by its indirect influence, but perfectly
plain and unmistakeable in the parts of the world, peopled
by the Aryan race, where the Empire has made itself felt
very slightly or not at all. As regards the Sclavonic Com-
munities. . . . We now know much more clearly than we
did before that the soil of the older provinces of the Russian
Empire has been, from time immemorial, almost exclusively
distributed amongst groups of self-styled kinsmen, collected
in cultivating Village-Communities, and self organised and
self-governing. . . . The re-examination of the written
evidence respecting ancient Teutonic life and custom pro-
ceeds without intermission, and incidentally much light has
been thrown on the early history of property by the remark
able work of Sohm (Fränkische Reichs- und Gerichtsverfassung).
The results obtained by the special method of G. L. von
Maurer have meantime been verified by comparison with
phenomena discovered in the most unexpected quarters. . .
Irish scholars, distinguished by remarkable sobriety of
thought... had pointed out many things in Irish custom
which connected it with the archaic practices known to be
still followed or to have been followed by the Germanic races.
As early as 1837 Mr. W. F. Skene, in a work of much value
called The Highlanders of Scotland, had corrected many of the
mistakes on the subject of Highland usage into which writers
exclusively conversant with feudal rules had been betrayed;
and the same eminent antiquarian, in an appendix to his
edition of the Scottish chronicler, Fordun, published in 1872,
confirms evidence which had reached me in considerable
quantities from private sources to the effect that Village-
Communities with shifting severalties' existed in the High-
lands within living memory.* Quite recently, also, M. Le
Play and others have come upon plain traces of such commu-
nities in several parts of France. . . . But much the most
instructive contribution to our knowledge of the ancient
Celtic Societies has been furnished by the Irish Government,
in the translations of the Ancient Laws of Ireland, which
have been published at its expense.
The first volume of
these translations was published in 1865; the second in 1869;
the third, enriched with some valuable prefaces, has only just
appeared [1875].'†

* Mr. W. F. Skene, in a valuable note on Tribe Communities in Scotland, appended to the second volume of his edition of Fordun's Chronicle says that "he believes the system of re-division of land to have been once universal, or at least widely extended, amongst the Scottish Celts."

† Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, pp. 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8.

VOL. XXIV.

66

These Ancient Laws of Ireland, the so-called Brehon Laws, are contained in the two largest of the assemblage of Irish Law-tracts, the Senchus Mor, or Great Book of the Ancient Law, and The Book of Aicill. From these we gather that village groups, or Septs, consisting of related families under a chief, held land in common with a periodical redistribution. In a word the evidence of these Irish law tracts proves "that the elements of what we are accustomed to consider the specially Germanic land-system [the Mark] are present in the territorial arrangements of the Irish tribe." An Irish manuscript, that is believed to date from the year 1100 A.D., the Lebor na Huidre, Book of the Dun Cow, compiled in the seventh century, declares that "there was not ditch, nor fence, nor stone-wall round land, till came the period of the sons of Aed Slane [A.D. 658-694], but [only] smooth fields. Because of the abundance of the households in their period, therefore it is that they introduced boundaries in Ireland." "Rundale" holding still prevails in parts of Ireland, which is a collective enjoyment of land by a group of villagers. "As lately as fifty years since," says Sir Henry Sumner Maine, cases were frequent in which the arable land was divided into farms which shifted among the tenant families periodically, and sometimes annually. Even when no such division was made, a well-known relic of the Mark-system, as it showed itself in Germany and England, was occasionally found: the arable portion of the estates was composed of three different qualities of soil, and each tenant had a lot or lots in the land of each quality, without reference to position." He adds that it is true that "Irish holdings in rundale' are not forms of property, but modes of occupation. There is always some person above who is legally owner of all the land held by the group of families, and who, theoretically, could change the method of holding, although, practically, popular feeling would put the greatest difficulties in his way. We must bear in mind, however, that archaic kinds of tenancy are constantly evidence of ancient forms of proprietorship."† But more than this, he goes on to point out that "the naturally organised, self-existing, Village-Community can no longer be claimed as an institution specially characteristic of the Aryan races. M. de Laveleye, following Dutch authorities, has described these communities as they are found in Java." Rénan sees them amongst Semitic tribes in Africa.

* Also known in Ireland and Scotland as "runrig," both rig and dole being names of acre strips (See p. 20). Dole (whence "rundale”) was a strip of meadow. Lectures on the Early History of Institutions,

pp. 101, 102.

Ibid., p. 77.

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