[122] Leist, Græco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, p. 159 sq.
[123] Cicero, Pro domo, 13 (34).
In ancient Wales districts were occupied by tribes under their petty kings or chiefs, and the tribe (cenedl) was a bundle of kindreds “bound together and interlocked by common interests and frequent intermarriages, as well as by the necessity of mutual protection against foreign foes.”[124] A group of households, again, corresponding to the Roman gens formed a trev, which was a cluster of scattered households, “not necessarily a village in the modern sense.”[125] The same seems to have been the case with the Teutonic vici, spoken of by Tacitus;[126] but that among the Teutons, also, the people of the same neighbourhood were blood-relatives may be directly inferred from a statement made by Cæsar.[127] They were not much addicted to agriculture,[128] and “the dreary world” they inhabited, with its desert aspect, its harsh climate, its lack of cultivation, was not favourable to the formation of permanent large social bodies of great cohesiveness. However, we meet among them social units which Cæsar calls regiones or pagi[129] of which the vici may be assumed to have been subdivisions. Among the highly agricultural Slavonians, on the other hand, we find even in the present time a social organisation very similar to that of the Hindus. The South Slavonians, as we have seen, live in house communities corresponding to the joint families in India. Now, when the members of a house community, or zadruga—as it is often called—become too numerous, a separation takes place, and the emigrants form new households by themselves. A zadruga is thus gradually expanded into a bratstvo, or brotherhood—a group of related house communities which not only feel themselves as branches of the same stock, but still have certain practical interests in common and a common chief. Several bratstva, finally, form a pleme, or tribe.[130] Among the Russians, again, the family, or joint family, has developed into a mir, or village community, composed of an assemblage of separate houses each ruled by its own head, but with a common village chief elected by the heads of the various households. The Russian mir is an institution very similar to the Hindu village community described above. The land belongs to the community, and in earlier days it was probably cultivated in common. At present it is divided between the component families, the lots shifting among them periodically, or perhaps vesting in them as their property, but always subject to a power in the collective body of villagers to veto its sale. Originally the mir was also a group of kindred; but, as in the Hindu village community, the tie of blood has been greatly weakened by all sorts of fictions and the admission of so many strangers that the tradition of a common origin is dim or lost.[131]
[124] Seebohm, English Village Community, p. 190. Idem, Tribal System in Wales, p. 61.
[125] Idem, English Village Community, p. 343.
[126] Tacitus, Germania, 16. Cf. Hildebrand, op. cit. p. 105 sqq.
[127] Cæsar, De bello Gallico, vi. 22:—“Magistratus ac princeps in annos singulos gentibus cognationibusque hominum, qui una coierint, quantum, et quo loco visum est, agri attribuunt.”
[128] Ibid. vi. 22.
[129] Cæsar, De bello Gallico, vi. 23.
[130] Krauss, op. cit. pp. 2, 32 sqq. von Hellwald, op. cit. p. 502 sq. Grosse, op. cit. p. 204 sq.