Among all these peoples a number of kindred families or joint families were united into a larger social group forming a village community or a cluster of households. The Vedic people called such a body of kindred janmanā or simply grāma, which means “village”;[114] and the same organisation still survives in India, though in a modified form. The type of Indian village communities which has been described by Sir Henry Maine is at once an assemblage of co-proprietors and an organised patriarchal society, providing for the management of the common fund and generally also for internal government, police, the administration of justice, and the apportionment of taxes and public duties. Unlike the joint family, the related families of the village community no longer hold their land as an indistinguishable common fund: they have portioned it out, at most they redistribute it periodically, and are thus on the high road to modern landed proprietorship. And whilst the joint family is a narrow circle of persons actually related to each other, the village community has very generally been adulterated by the admission of strangers, especially purchasers of shares, who have from time to time been engrafted on the original stock of blood-relatives. Yet in all such cases there is the assumption of an original common parentage; hence the Hindu village community of the type indicated, whenever it is not actually an association of kinsmen, is always a body of co-proprietors formed on the model of such an association.[115]
[114] Zimmer, Altindisches Leben, p. 159 sq.
[115] Maine, Ancient Law, p. 260 sqq. Idem, Dissertations on Early Law and Custom, p. 240. Elphinstone, History of India, p. 68 sqq. Mr. Baden-Powell (Indian Village Community, p. 3 sqq.) has shown that Sir Henry Maine’s general description of Indian village communities holds true only of a certain class of villages in India.
Corresponding to the Vedic grāma there were the Iranian viç, the Greek genos, and the Roman gens; and as among the Vedic people several grāmas formed a viç and several viçs a jana,[116] so the Iranian viç, the Greek genos, and the Roman gens were, respectively, subdivisions of a zantu, phratria, and curia; and these again were subdivisions of a still more comprehensive unit, a daqyu, phyle, and tribus.[117] The Roman territory was in earliest times divided into a number of clan-districts, each inhabited by a particular gens, which was thus a group associated at once by locality and by a common descent. Whilst each household had its own portion of land, the clan-household or village had a clan-land belonging to it, and this clan-land was managed up to a comparatively late period after the analogy of household-land, that is, on the system of joint-possession, each clan tilling its own land and thereafter distributing the produce among the several households belonging to it. Even the traditions of Roman law furnish the information that wealth consisted at first in cattle and the usufruct of the soil, and that it was not till later that land came to be distributed among the burgesses as their own special property.[118] Still in historical times, if a person left no sons or agnates living at his death, the inheritance escheated to the gentiles, or entire body of Roman citizens bearing the same name with the deceased, whereas no part of it was given to any relative united, however closely, with the dead man through female descent.[119] But as the Hindu village community, so also the Roman gens, though originally a group of blood-relatives inhabiting a common district, was already in early times recruited from men of alien extraction who were assumed to be descended from a common ancestor. And it is difficult to believe that either in Rome or Greece even the fiction of a common origin could be preserved for long when the organisation of the people into gentes, phratries, and tribes was adopted by the State as a system of political division and their numbers were fixed.[120] When the genos and gens first appear to us in history they were mere dwindling survivals, except in one respect: they remained, as they had been from the outset,[121] religious communities long after they had lost all other practical importance. This was especially the case at Athens, where certain reputed gentes for centuries continued to play a prominent part in the religious cult;[122] and the Romans seem to have preserved their gentilicia sacra still in Cicero’s time.[123]
[116] Zimmer, op. cit. p. 159 sq.
[117] Leist, Græco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, p. 104 sq.
[118] Mommsen, History of Rome, i. 45, 46, 238.
[119] Maine, Ancient Law, p. 220 sq. Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique, p. 126.
[120] Leist, Græco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, p. 150 sqq. It is expressly said that at Athens the members of the same γένος were not necessarily regarded as blood-relations (see Bunsen, De jure hereditario Atheniensium, p. 104, n. 28).
[121] Schoemann, Griechische Alterthümer, ii. 548 sqq. Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung, iii. 126, 130. Fustel de Coulanges, op. cit. p. 124 sqq.