Folklore as an Historical Science

by George Laurence Gomme

It is necessary to consider another great element in human life with reference to its ethnological value, for folklore has always been intimately associated with it, and recently, owing to Mr. Frazer's brilliant researches, this branch of folklore has been almost unduly accentuated. I mean, of course, agriculture. Mr. Frazer has ignored the ethnological side of agriculture, and it has been appropriated by the student of economics as a purely historical institution. This has caused a special position to be given to agricultural rites and customs almost without question and certainly without examination, and it will be necessary to go rather closely into the subject in order to clear up the difficulties which present neglect has produced. I shall once again draw my illustrations from the British Isles.

I put my facts in this way: (1) In all parts of Great Britain there exist rites, customs, and usages connected with agriculture which are obviously and admittedly not of legislative or political origin, and which present details exactly similar to each other in character, but differing from each other in status; (2) that the difference in status is to be accounted for by the effects of successive conquests; (3) that the identity in character is not to be accounted for by reference to manorial history, because the area of manorial institutions is not coincident with the area of these rites, customs, and usages; (4) that exact parallels to them exist in India as integral portions of village institutions; (5) that the Indian parallels carry the subject a step further than the European examples because they are stamped with the mark of difference in race-origin, one portion belonging to the Aryan people and the other to the non-Aryan.

I shall now pick out some examples, and explain from them the evidence which seems to me to prove that race-distinction is the key for the origin of these agricultural rites and usages in Europe as in India. I have dealt with these examples at some length in my book on the village community, and I shall only use such details as I require for my immediate purpose.

My first point is that to get at the survivals of the village community in Britain it is not necessary to approach it through the medium of manorial history. Extremely ancient as I am inclined to think manorial history is, it is unquestionably loaded with an artificial terminology and with the chains so deftly forged by lawyers. An analysis of the chief features in the types of the English village community shows that the manorial element is by no means a common factor in the series. These types mark the transition from the tribal form to the village form. In Harris Island we have the chief with his free tribesmen around him, connected by blood kinship, living in scattered homesteads, just like the German tribes described by Tacitus. Under this tribal community is the embryo of the village community, consisting of smaller tenantry and cottar serfs, who live together in minute villages, holding their land in common and yearly distributing the holdings by lot. In this type the tribal constitution is the real factor, and the village constitution the subordinated factor as yet wholly undeveloped, scarcely indeed discernible except by very close scrutiny.

At Kilmorie the tribal community is represented merely by the scattered homesteads. These are occupied by a joint farm-tenantry, who hold their lands upon the system of the village community. Here the village constitution has gradually entered into, so to speak, the tribal constitution, and has almost absorbed it.

At Heisgier and Lauder the tribal community is represented by the last link under the process of dissolution, namely, the free council of the community by which the village rights are governed, while the village community has developed to a considerable extent.

At Aston and at Malmesbury the old tribal constitution is still kept alive in a remarkable manner, and I will venture to quote from my book the account of the evolution at Aston of a tenantry from the older tribal constitution, because in this case we are actually dealing with a manor, and the evidence is unique so far as England is concerned.

The first point is that the village organisation, the rights of assembly, the free open-air meetings, and the corporate action incident to the manor of Aston and Cote, attach themselves to the land divisions of sixteen hides, because although these hides had grown in 1657 into a considerable tenancy, fortunately as a tenancy they kept their original unity in full force and so obstinately clung to their old system of government as to keep up by representation the once undivided holding of the hide. If the organisation of the hide had itself disappeared, it still formed the basis of the village government, the sixteen hides sending up their sixteen elected representatives. How the tenancy grew out of the original sixteen homesteads may perhaps be conjecturally set forth. In the first place the owners of the yard-lands succeeded to the place originally occupied by the owners of the sixteen hides. Instead of the original sixteen group-owners we have therefore sixty-four individual owners, each yard-land having remained in possession of an owner. And then at succeeding stages of this dissolution we find the yard-lands broken up until, in 1848, "some farmers of Aston have only half or even a quarter of a yard-land, while some have as many as ten or eleven yard-lands in their single occupation." Then disintegration proceeded to the other proprietary rights, which, originally appendant to the homestead only, became appendant to the person and not to the residence, and are consequently "bought and sold as separate property, by which means it results that persons resident at Bampton, or even at great distance, have rights on Aston and Cote Common." And finally we lose all trace of the system, as described by Mr. Horde and as depicted by the representative character of the Sixteens, and in its place find that "there are some tenants who have rights in the common field and not in the pasture, and vice versâ several occupiers have the right of pasture who do not possess any portion of arable land in the common field," so that both yard-lands and hides have now disappeared, and absolute ownership of land has taken their place. Mr. Horde's MS. enables us to proceed back from modern tenancy-holding to the holding by yard-lands; the rights of election in the yard-lands enable us to proceed back to the original holding of the sixteen hides.