VILLAGE COMMUNITY, the means by which many scholars contend that great part of Europe must have been brought into cultivation. A clan of set tlers took a tract of land, built their huts thereon, and laid out common fields, which they cultivated in common as one family. The land was divided out every few years into family lots, but the whole continued to be cultivated by the com munity subject to the established customs as interpreted in the village council by the sense of the village elders. This may still be seen in the villages of Russia, and even in some parts of England may still be traced the ancient boundaries of the great common field, divided length wise into three strops (one fallow, the two others in different kinds of crop), and again crosswise into lots held by the villagers. This theory, often called the mark system, was started by Von Maurer in Germany, but mainly owes its cur rency to Sir Henry Maine, who in his work entitled "Village Communities in the East and West" (1871) pointed out close parallels in the archaic land com munities in India. The first serious at tack upon the theory was made by F. Seebohm, in his work "The English Vil lage Community Examined" (1883; 4th ed. 1890), which labors to prove that the ancient village community was not or iginally free, but traces back to the Roman manorial system of a community in serfdom under a manor with its lord. Fustel de Coulanges dealt Von Maurer's theory a still more deadly blow by turn ing against him the evidence of the Leges Barbarorum and early chartu laries on which his argument mainly re lied. He proves also that the Russian anir does not represent agrarian com munism, the soil belonging not to it but to some one else, and the peasants merely paying rent collectively as well as cul tivating the land collectively. The prim
itive mark, the association of the mark (Markgenossensehaf , the original com mon land (Gemeinland or Allmende)— all the evidence for these he weighs and finds wanting, contending that the whole imposing structure of argument has been erected out of a series of misunder standings, national communism having been confused with the common owner ship of the family, tenure in common with ownership in common, agrarian communism with village commons.
Mr. Gomme considers Lauder and Kells as surviving types of the tribal community in its most primitive form; besides the example of Hitchin, from which Mr. Seebohm started working back, he examines the cases of Aston village, in the parish of Bampton, Ox fordshire, Chippenham in Wiltshire, Mal mesbury, and others, his conclusion be ing that the village community is no modern institution, but one beginning far back in the history of human civil ization, and probably a phase through which all peoples have passed. In the hill cultivation and settlement, of which many traces remain, he sees evidence of pre-Aryan influence analogous to similar customs surviving in India. The com munity in its tribal form was the prom inent feature, the village of serfs the subordinate; groups of kindred occupy ing their several homesteads and the lands around; small villages of serfs occupying cottage homes, massed to gether, and using the lands around them in intermixed or runrig occupation. Thus Mr. Seebohm's formula, defining the English institution as a manor with a village community in serfdom under it, he would rewrite as a tribal community with a village in serfdom under it.