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Updated: May 2, 2025
The old system of the villagers cultivating in turn strips of land in open fields was undoubtedly unsound, if the amount of wealth produced is the sole criterion; but it produced enough for the individual village-community, and the increased production accruing from inclosures went to swell the total wealth of the nation and of those who manipulated it at the cost of the tillers of the soil.
However, the village-community institutions so well respond to the needs and conceptions of the tillers of the soil that, in spite of all, Europe is up to this date covered with living survivals of the village communities, and European country life is permeated with customs and habits dating from the community period.
We saw how the change from a nomadic to a stationary mode of life, attendant upon the adoption of agricultural pursuits, converted the clan into a mark or village-community, something like those which exist to-day in Russia. The political progress of primitive society seems to have consisted largely in the coalescence of these small groups into larger groups.
Such documents were called Kumi-cho or "Kumi*-enactments": they established the rules of conduct to be observed by all the members of a village-community, and their social interest is very great. By personal inquiry I have learned that in various parts of the country, rules much like those recorded in the Kumi-cho, are still enforced by village custom.
The most primitive self-governing body of which we have any knowledge is the village-community of the ancient Teutons, of which such strict counterparts are found in other parts of the Aryan world as to make it apparent that in its essential features it must be an inheritance from prehistoric Aryan antiquity.
In England, therefore, the free village-community, though perhaps nowhere found in its primitive integrity, has nevertheless survived in partially transfigured forms which have played no unimportant part in the history of the English people. In one shape or another the assembly of freemen for purposes of local legislation has always existed.
The movement gradually took a great extension, and on a small territory, the Taurida statisticians found 161 villages in which communal ownership had been introduced by the peasant proprietors themselves, chiefly in the years 1855-1885, in lieu of individual ownership. Quite a variety of village-community types has been freely worked out in this way by the settlers.
Round the original nucleus there gradually accreted from the earliest period of the Middle Ages the freed men of the surrounding districts, fugitive serfs, and others who sought that protection and means of livelihood in a community under the immediate domination of a powerful lord, which they could not otherwise obtain when their native village-community had perchance been raided by some marauding noble and his retainers.
Each village-community was self-governing; the headman in it taking the place of the father in the family; he was responsible for order, so it was his business to keep the people happy; and the same principle was extended to fit the province, the viceroyalty, the empire. The system is Mencian; the inspiration behind it from Confucius.
However, another element, besides the village-community principle, was required to give to these growing centres of liberty and enlightenment the unity of thought and action, and the powers of initiative, which made their force in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
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