Neither the village nor the tribal community seems to have been introduced into Britain during a historical period reaching back for 2,000 years at least.
The English village community in serfdom, and its
three-field system.
A step out of slavery towards the freedom of the new order of things.
On the one hand, the village community of the eastern districts of Britain was connected with a settled agriculture which, apparently dating earlier [p438] than the Roman invasion and improved during the Roman occupation, was carried on, at length, under that three-field form of the open-field system which became the shell of the English village community. The equality in its yard-lands and the single succession which preserved this equality we have found to be apparently marks not of an original freedom, not of an original allodial allotment on the German 'mark system,' but of a settled serfdom under a lordship—a semi-servile tenancy implying a mere usufruct, theoretically only for life, or at will, and carrying with it no inherent rights of inheritance. But this serfdom, as we have seen reason to believe, was, to the masses of the people, not a degradation, but a step upward out of a once more general slavery. Certainly during the 1,200 years over which the direct English evidence extends the tendency has been towards more and more of freedom. In other words, as time went on during these 1,200 years, the serfdom of the old order of things has been gradually breaking up under those influences, whatever they may have been, which have produced the new order of things.
The tribal community and its 'run-rig' system.
opposed to the new order of things.
On the other hand, the tribal community of the western districts of Great Britain and of Ireland, though parallel in time with the village community of the eastern districts, was connected with an earlier stage of economic development, in which the rural economy was pastoral rather than agricultural. This tribal community was bound together, perhaps, in a unique degree, by the strong ties of blood relationship between free tribesmen. The equality which followed the possession of the tribal blood involved an equal division among the sons of tribesmen, and was [p439] maintained in spite of the inequality of families by frequent redistributions of the tribal lands, and shiftings of the tribesmen from one homestead to another according to tribal rules. We have traced the curious method of clustering the homesteads in arithmetical groups mentioned in the ancient Welsh laws, and still practised in Ireland in the seventeenth century, and we have found many survivals of it in the present names and divisions of Irish townlands. We have found the simple form of open-field husbandry used under the tribal system, and suited to its precarious and shifting agriculture, still surviving in the 'rundale' or 'run-rig' system, by which, to this day, is effected in Ireland and western Scotland that infinite subdivision of holdings which marks the tenacious adherence to tribal instincts on the part of a people still fighting an unequal battle against the new order of things.
The new order opposed to community and equality.
The new order has, no doubt, arisen in one sense out of both branches of the old, but neither the manorial village community of the eastern district, nor the tribal community of the west, can be said to be its parent. Its fundamental principle seems to be opposed to the community and equality of the old order in both its forms. The freedom of the individual and growth of individual enterprise and property which mark the new order imply a rebellion against the bonds of the communism and forced equality, alike of the manorial and of the tribal system. It has triumphed by breaking up both the communism of serfdom and the communism of the free tribe.