Villainage in England. Paul Vinogradoff

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СКАЧАТЬ Saxon period he lays stress chiefly on the early rise of great property, and the great importance of 'Hlafords' in social organisation. He pays no attention to the village community, and chiefly cares for the landlord. But still even Gneist admits the original personal freedom of the great mass of the people, and his analysis of the English condition is based on the assumption, that it represents one variation of Teutonic development: this gives Gneist a place among the Germanists, although his views on particular subjects differ from those of other scholars of the same school.[23]

      The Mark system.

      Its chief representatives have acquired such a celebrity that it is hardly necessary to insist again, that excellent work has been done by them for the study of the past. But the direction of their work has been rather one-sided; it was undertaken either from the standpoint of political institutions or from that of general culture and external growth; the facts of agriculture, of the evolution of classes, of legal organisation were touched upon only as subsidiary to the main objects of general history. And yet, even from the middle of the century, the attention of Europe begins to turn towards those very facts. The 'masses' come up with their claims behind the 'classes,' the social question emerges in theory and in practice, in reform and revolution; Liberals and Conservatives have to reckon with the fact that the great majority of the people are more excited, and more likely to be moved by the problems of work and wages than by problems of political influence. The everlasting, ever-human struggle for power gets to be considered chiefly in the light of the distribution of wealth; the distribution of society into classes and conditions appears as the connecting link between the economical process and the political process. This great change in the aspect of modern life could not but react powerfully on the aspect of historical literature. G.F. von Maurer and Hanssen stand out as the main initiators of the new movement in our studies. The many volumes devoted by G.F. Maurer[24] to the village and the town of Germany are planned on a basis entirely different from that of his predecessors. Instead of proceeding from the whole to the parts, and of using social facts merely as a background to political history, he concentrates everything round the analysis of the Mark, as the elementary organisation for purposes of husbandry and ownership. The Mark is thus taken up not in the vague sense and manner in which it was treated by Kemble and his followers; it is described and explained on the strength of copious, though not very well sifted, evidence. On the other hand, Hanssen's masterly essays[25] on agrarian questions, and especially on the field-systems, gave an example of the way in which work was to be done as to facts of husbandry proper.

      Nasse.

      Nasse's pamphlet on the village community[26] may be considered as the first application of the new methods and new results to English history. The importance of his little volume cannot easily be overrated: all subsequent work has had to start from its conclusions.

      Nasse's picture of the ancient English agricultural system, though drawn from scanty sources, is a very definite one. Most of the land is enclosed only during the latter part of the year, and during the rest of the year remains in the hands of the community. Temporary enclosures rise upon the ploughed field while the crop is growing; their object, however, is not to divide the land between neighbours but to protect the crop against pasturing animals; the strips of the several members of the township lie intermixed, and their cultivation is not left to the views and interests of the owners, but settled by the community according to a general plan. The meadows are also divided into strips, but these change hands in a certain rotation determined by lot or otherwise. The pasture ground remains in the possession of the whole community. The notion of private property, therefore, can be applied in this system only to the houses and closes immediately adjoining them.

      Then the feudal epoch divides the country into manors, a form which originated at the end of the Saxon period and spread everywhere in Norman times. The soil of the manor consists of demesne lands and tributary lands. These two classes of lands do not quite correspond to the distinction between land cultivated by the lord himself and soil held of him by dependants; there may be leaseholders on the demesne, but there the lord is always free to change the mode of cultivation and occupation, while he has no right to alter the arrangements on the tributary portion. This last is divided between free socmen holding on certain conditions, villains and cottagers. The villains occupy equal holdings; their legal condition is a very low one, although they are clearly distinguished from slaves, and belong more to the soil than to the lord. The cottagers have homesteads and crofts, but no holdings in the common fields; the whole group presents the material from which, in process of time, the agricultural labourers have been developed.

      The common system of husbandry manifests itself in many ways: the small holders club together for ploughing; four virgates or yardlands have to co-operate in order to start an eight-oxen plough. The services are often laid upon the whole village and not on separate householders; on the other hand the village, as a whole, enters into agreement with the lord about leases or commutation of services for money.

      Each holding is formed of strips which lie intermixed with the component parts of other holdings in different fields, and this fact is intimately connected with the principle of joint ownership. The whole system begins to break up in the thirteenth century, much earlier than in France or Germany. As soon as services get commuted for money rents, it becomes impossible to retain the labouring people in serfdom. Hired labourers and farmers take the place of villains, and the villain's holding is turned into a copyhold and protected by law. Although the passage to modern forms begins thus early, traces of the original communalism may be found everywhere, even in the eighteenth century.

      Maine.

      Nasse's pamphlet is based on a careful study of authorities, and despite its shortness must be treated as a work of scientific research. But if all subsequent workers have to reckon with it in settling particular questions, general conceptions have been more widely influenced by Sir Henry Maine's lectures, which did not aim at research, and had in view the broad aspects of the subject. Their peculiar method is well known to be that of comparing facts from very different environments—from the Teutonic, the Celtic, the Hindu world; Maine tries to sketch a general process where other people only see particular connexions and special reasons. The chapters which fall within the line of our inquiry are based chiefly on a comparison between Western Europe and India. The agrarian organisation of many parts of India presents at this very day, in full work and in all stages of growth and decay, the village community of which some traces are still scattered in the records of Europe. There and here the process is in the main the same, the passage from collective ownership to individualism is influenced by the same great forces, notwithstanding all the differences of time and place. The original form of agrarian arrangement is due to the settlement of a group of free men, which surrenders to its individual members the use of arable land, meadows, pasture and wood, but retains the ownership and the power to control and modify the rights of using the common land. There can be no doubt that the legal theory, which sees in the modern rights of commoners mere encroachments upon the lord, carries feudal notions back into too early a period.

      The real question as conceived by Maine is this—By what means was the free village community turned into the manor of the lord? The petty struggles between townships must have led to the subjugation of some groups by others; in each particular village the headman had the means to use his authority in order to improve his material position; and when a family contrived to retain an office in the hands of its members this at once gave matters an aristocratical turn. In Western Europe external causes had to account for a great deal in the gradual rise of territorial lordship. When the barbarian invaders came into contact with Roman civilisation and took possession of the provincial soil, they found private ownership and great property in full development, and naturally fell under the influence of these accomplished facts; their village community was broken up and transformed gradually into the manorial system[27].

      Maine traces economic history from an originally free community; Nasse takes the existence of such a community for granted. The statements of one are too general, however, and sometimes too hypothetical, the other has in view husbandry proper rather than the legal СКАЧАТЬ