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the country. Its existence suffices at least to show that the hamlet lands contain very distinctive types of settlement that await investigation.

In the village lands little has been done in the way of distinguishing and classifying forms of settlement. The best memoir is one by Mr. Wm. Page (Archæologia, 1918, Vol. 69, p. 47), but it is confined to the towns and villages of Hertfordshire. After remarking that all the settlements in that county are of the compact type, Mr. Page distinguishes four classes :

(1) Settlements situated off the lines of communication; (2) Settlements situated on the lines of communication;

(3) Ring fence settlements arranged round an open or enclosed

area;

(4) "Fortuitous " settlements often arranged round a church.

The first class is the compact village in the midst of its fields, always near a stream or a spring, and probably designed for defence as well as convenience. It is of undoubted Teutonic origin and the typical home of the English conquerors. The settlements on the lines of communication belong to later and more peaceful times, when agriculture was still dominant, but trade was beginning. They include market towns with roads. broadened out to form a V-shaped market-place; double towns formed round a bridge head, primarily military in character, but developing into trading centres, because the bridge attracted the trade; and roadside villages resulting from migration to the highways when highways became attractive and profitable. The ringfence settlement is considered to be of later date, often postconquest, and is characteristic of forest land which in the midlands generally means a heavy cold clay. The testimony of archæology is that the upland peoples of the days before Cæsar generally avoided both lowland and forest, that the forest was attacked in some measure during the Roman period, that the first peoples to do so with real determination and success were the valley-loving English and Danes, and that under the skilful guidance of the Normans the effort was redoubled and concluded.

These few observations show how much study can still be profitably devoted to the forms of village, and of the small town that grew out of the village. The classification so far suggested is not exhaustive, nor has the basis of the classification been agreed. A classification by situation, upland or valley, on or off

the highways, is on a different plane from a classification by form, as compact, circular, ring-fence, or scattered. Again, the relation of the village form to the field system is of an intimate character. Dr. Gray's exhaustive study gives us the relevant materials as to the distribution of the field systems, and makes it easier to plot a map of the villages upon a map of the fields. Kent, for example, possesses a very distinctive field system as it possessed the distinctive tenure of gavelkind. If a man of Kent could be persuaded to make a detailed survey of the Kentish villages he would earn our gratitude.

As a footnote, we may add that the position of the church is a matter that deserves attention. Sacred sites may have long histories, they may be comparatively recent, but once established, they are persistent. We have seen that the church in a central position is the distinctive feature of a village type as yet studied only in Wales. One is never certain where to find the church. It may adjoin the village green, it may appear as an annex to a castle or a manor house, it may have been part of a monastery, it may overshadow a small market place, it may stand in lonely isolation as if the villagers had deserted religion. Of one thing only can we be certain, that none of the varied positions are fortuitous they all contain little fragments of history if their secrets could be disinterred.

We may now return to the problem of the origin of the extraordinary arrangement of strips characteristic of the two and threefield system. Upon this, the greatest assistance can be obtained from Mr. Lewinski's "Origin of Property "—a little book that contains in seventy pages a more valuable collection of facts and of acute inferences than is generally found in treatises of ten times its length. The author's main illustrations are drawn from the very rich pre-war Russian literature, official and otherwise, dealing with agricultural conditions in European Russia and Siberia. Among the communities inhabiting that vast area every stage of the evolution of property seems to exist in a living form, and we can observe things functioning before our eyes that in western Europe are matters of antiquarian curiosity.

Labour and scarcity are the twin pillars upon which property rests. Among pure nomads, whose grazing grounds are more than sufficient for their beasts, no landed property exists. As soon as scarcity of any essential thing supervenes, of forests,

pastures, or watering places, the community appears as a regulating, but not an owning authority. We can observe exactly the same process at work in highly civilized societies in the gradual regulation of rights to water and air—a process that has certainly not yet reached its final form. The growth of property varies in accordance with the nature of the thing, its scarcity, and the amount of labour incorporated in it. Our commons even now remain in the stage of regulation. Their limited area necessitates some means of preventing over-pasturing, but it necessitates nothing more, consequently by the general law and by manorial by-laws the number of beasts that can be turned out is stinted or limited-but that is all. Feudal law has given the lord of the manor a theoretical ownership of the soil, subject always to the rights of the commoners, but otherwise they are not property at all.

The greatest cause of scarcity is the growth of population. It has, in fact, determined the forms of property in land. The modern economist would say that population tends to increase beyond the means of subsistence, but an ancient Irish chronicler enunciated the same principle with equal accuracy, but greater vividness, in the statement: "Because of the abundance of the households they introduced boundaries in Ireland." Mr. Lewinski deduces from his Russian and other evidence that the same cause produced the village community. He is perfectly clear that in Russia the village community is not a very ancient, much less a primitive institution. It developed in European Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its formation can even be observed at the present time. From an entirely different standpoint and as a result of the observation of different facts, Baden-Powell came to the same conclusion about the joint village in India. "It is hardly possible to appeal to the Indian village community as evidence in any general question of archaic land custom."

The process of transition from the self-contained farm to the village begins at the easiest stage, the regulation of the hay cutting in the meadows and the stinting of the pastures. The arable land, just because it incorporates more individual labour, is a much tougher proposition. Gradually, under the strong pressure of imminent starvation the difficulties are overcome, and the arable is redistributed so as to give every household at least a bare measure of subsistence.

Strange as it may seem, particularly to those with no first-hand knowledge of agricultural operations, the system of strips follows as an inevitable consequence from the determination to give substantial equality of opportunity to the holdings. We have already quoted the striking case of a township in Donegal which became subdivided in a manner almost incredible in the short space of two generations. This is not a sample of extreme perversity, but an arresting instance of a uniform tendency. All the observers-friendly or hostile-are unanimous upon the point. A decidedly unfriendly witness (Sinclair in the 1794 Report on Caithness) says: "Were there 20 tenants and as many fields, each tenant would think himself unjustly treated, unless he had a proportionate share in each." So Mr. Lewinski says of the Russian communities that the division into strips gives equality in the nature of the soil and in distance from the homestead. In the open field it is also necessary that the strips should be evenly divided between the fields, so that the benefit of the crops and the burden of the fallow should be equitably apportioned. Some of the medieval records prove that some portions of the same field might be eight times as valuable as others. Maitland quotes a delightful description of a selion* in the Cambridge fields that "is called ducke pytt because yt standeth in winter full of water." If a man's whole allotment of arable was in ducke pytt he would just have starved to death in a wet season, and his soul would not have rested more peaceably because a successor in a dry season might have obtained a bumper crop.

Two exceedingly instructive maps reproduced by Mr. Lewinski prove that the sub-division was carried far enough to secure substantial equality, but no further. In a community situated in south Russia upon the fertile "black earth," where the soil needs little manuring and is uniform in character, the land of the householder is divided into eight strips. In the northern example, with varied soil needing much manuring, a similar holding is divided into no less than 100 strips.

It may be worth a digression to observe that champion agriculture involves considerable co-operation, but implies nothing of communism or what some term communalism. Such things are entirely alien to the peasant mind. Even a Soviet commissar would be hard put to find any trace of such an idea in all the

*A strip of land of indeterminate area in an open field.

detailed evidence of medieval peasant life collected by Mr. Coulton. The facts collected by Mr. Lewinski give the deathblow to any theory of primitive communism, even in the modified form presented by Maine. Early property is individual, and group property only arises when considerable advances have been made in civilization. "Land was not owned by ideal persons before it was owned by natural persons." The very idea that property can belong to an association of men is of itself evidence of a considerable advance upon primitive mentality; it is long before men can comprehend such an idea, much less formulate it. The yoke of custom may be unbending, the peasant in all his ways may be the most unyielding conservative, but in matters of property he is individualism embodied. The homestead with its surrounding land—the toft—was always individual property, but so also were the strips in the fields. The community owned nothing. If the village community was a communist institution, because its arable fields were divided into strips and ploughed and reaped by partnership methods, then the Great Western Railway is a communist institution, because its capital is divided into shares.

We appear to have wandered far from the continuity of the English village; but, despite notable examples of a contrary method, facts are the best foundation for conclusions. The first matter to consider is the interpretation of the distribution of the field systems. It is well to remember the warning of Mr. Lewinski that arrangements of property are not necessarily matters of race or language, but of economic conditions and agricultural opportunities. In the same way, Dr. Gray argues that the distribution of two fields as distinguished from three fields cannot be correlated with any racial or tribal settlements. It was a matter of agricultural convenience depending upon soil and climate. Nearly every midland county has examples of both, and neither dominates large stretches of territory. There is evidence likewise that the three-field system grew at the expense of the two-field one, during the thirteenth century. It is quite contrary to the facts to say that one system is characteristic of the Danish counties and the other of the English counties.

When we contrast the two and three-field system considered as a whole with the Celtic system we are on firmer ground. The village or large-field system is found only in the lands that were

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