Village Community

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

the means by which many scholars contend that great part of Europe must have been brought into cultivation. A clan of settlers took a tract of land, built their huts thereon, and laid out common fields, which they cultivated in common as one family. The land was divided out every few years into family lots, but the whole continued to be cultivated by the community subject to the established customs as interpreted in the village council by the sense of the village elders. This may still be seen in the villages of Russia, and even in some parts of England may still be traced the ancient boundaries of the great common field, divided lengthwise into three strops (one fallow, the two others in different kinds of crop), and again crosswise into lots held by the villagers. This theory, often called the mark system, was started by Von Maurer in Germany, but mainly owes its currency to Sir Henry Maine, who in his work entitled "Village Communities in the East and West" (1871) pointed out close parallels in the archaic land communities in India. The first serious attack upon the theory was made by F. Seebohm, in his work "The English Village Community Examined" (1883; 4th ed. 1890), which labors to prove that the ancient village community was not originally free, but traces back to the Roman manorial system of a community in serfdom under a manor with its lord. Fustel de Coulanges dealt Von Maurer's theory a still more deadly blow by turning against him the evidence of the Leges Barbarorum and early chartularies on which his argument mainly relied. He proves also that the Russian mir does not represent agrarian communism, the soil belonging not to it but to some one else, and the peasants merely paying rent collectively as well as cultivating the land collectively. The primitive mark, the association of the mark (Markgenossenschaft), the original_common land (Gemeinland or Allmende) all the evidence for these he weighs and finds wanting, contending that the whole imposing structure of argument has been erected out of a series of misunderstandings, national communism having been confused with the common ownership of the family, tenure in common with ownership in common, agrarian communism with village commons. Mr. Gomme considers Lauder and Kells as surviving types of the tribal community in its most primitive form; besides the example of Hitchin, from which Mr. Seebohm started working back, he examines the cases of Aston village, in the parish of Bampton, Oxfordshire, Chippenham in Wiltshire, Malmesbury, and others, his conclusion being ing that the village community is no modern institution, but one beginning far back in the history of human civilization, and probably a phase through which all peoples have passed. In the hill cultivation and settlement, of which many traces remain, he sees evidence of pre-Aryan influence analogous to similar customs surviving in India. The community in its tribal form was the prominent feature, the village of serfs the subordinate; groups of kindred occupying their several homesteads and the lands around; small villages of serfs occupying cottage homes, massed together, and using the lands around them in intermixed or runrig occupation. Thus Mr. Seebohm's formula, defining the English institution as a manor with a village community in serfdom under it, he would rewrite as a tribal community with a village in serfdam under it.