3. Sir William Hunter suggests that we can distinguish an even earlier stage. “We know,” he says (p. 206), “that the Aryan invaders never penetrated in sufficient numbers into India to engross any large proportion of the soil. That throughout five-sixths of the continent, the actual work of tillage remained in the hands of the Non-Aryan or Sudra races; and that, even at a very remote time, husbandry had become a degrading occupation in the eyes of the Aryan conquerors.... In Orissa, where Aryan colonisation never amounted to more than a thin top-dressing of priests and nobles, the generic word of husbandman is sometimes used as a synonym for the Non-Aryan caste. At this day, we see the acknowledged aboriginal castes of the mountains in the very act of passing into the low-caste cultivators of the Hindu village, as soon as Hindu civilisation penetrates their glens.” He thinks it probable, therefore, that the Hindu village is the “outcome” of Non-Aryan Hamlets such as those of the Kandhs. This is not unlikely; but supposing the conjecture to be correct, we must notice two essential points. The first is that the Kandh Hamlet, with its population of, on an average, some five-and-thirty persons, is nothing more than a cluster of independent households, placed close together for mutual protection. The absolute ownership of the soil is vested in each family; and the Hamlet as a whole exercises no corporate authority whatever (pp. 72, 77, 208, 210). And in the second place, if the Hamlet expanded into the village and the village became that “firmly cohering entity” which it now is, land-lordship would seem to have developed pari passu (Ibid., pp. 212-3). At no stage of agrarian history do we find the village community of theory, which is “an organised self-acting group of families exercising a common proprietorship over a definite tract of land” (Maine, Village Communities, pp. 10, 12). Where the cultivating group are in any real sense proprietors, they have no corporate character; and where they have a corporate character, they are not proprietors.
NOTE B.—ON THE RUSSIAN MIR.
Since the preceding chapter was written, fresh light has been cast on the history of the Russian village group by the work of M. Kovalevsky, Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia (London, 1891). According to M. Kovalevsky, the view that the peasants retained their personal liberty until the decrees of Boris Godounoff at the end of the sixteenth century deprived them of freedom of migration, is now generally abandoned by Russian scholars (pp. 210-211); and it is recognised that long before that date serfdom of a character similar to that of western Europe was in existence, over, at any rate, a considerable area of the Empire. Still more significant is another fact on which M. Kovalevsky lays great stress. It is commonly asserted, or implied, that the custom of periodical re-division of the lands of the mir is a survival from ancient usage, and forms a transitional stage between common and individual ownership (e.g., Maine, Ancient Law, pp. 267-270). But M. Kovalevsky assures us that the practice is quite modern; that it dates no further back than last century; and that it was due chiefly to Peter the Great’s imposition of a capitation tax (pp. 93-97).
M. Kovalevsky is none the less a strenuous supporter of the village community theory; and he is indignant with M. Fustel for “endorsing an opinion,” that of M. Tchitcherin, “which has already been refuted” by M. Beliaiev. Unfortunately he does not cite any of the facts on which M. Beliaiev relied. He himself allows that but scanty evidence can be found in old Russian documents in support of the theory (pp. 74, 82); and bases his own argument rather on what has taken place in recent centuries, from the sixteenth down to our own day, when outlying territories have been colonized by immigrants. But this is a dangerous method of proof when used by itself; it would lead, for instance, to the conclusion that because the early communities in New England were not subject to manorial lords, there had never been manorial lords in England. And even in the cases he describes, “the unlimited right of private homesteads to appropriate as much soil as each required was scrupulously maintained” (p. 80)—which is very different from the Mark of Maurer.
[1] Earle, Land Charters, p. xlv.
[2] Cf. Southbydyk in Boldon Book, Domesday, iv. 568; and Nasse’s remarks (Agricultural Community, p. 46) as to cases of purchase in Mecklenburg.
[3] See Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, Introduction; and also in Engl. Hist. Rev., 1888, p. 568; Blakesley, in Law Quarterly Rev., 1889, p. 113.
[4] Abundant instances in Earle, Land Charters; cf. Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alleu, p. 377.
[5] See Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alleu, ch. vi.
[6] Hist. Eccl., iii., 17, 21, 22, 28. The use of the word township and its relation to villa require fresh examination in the light of our increased knowledge of Continental usage. Tunscip apparently first appears in Alfred’s translation of Bede, at the end of the ninth century; and its first and only appearance in A.S. law is in Edgar iv. 8, in the second half of the tenth. Schmid, Gesetze der Angelsachen, Gloss. s. v.