Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/86

Rh fields which was considered archaic even in those early times. The Swedish laws use the expression “forniskift,” which means ancient mode of allotment, and another term corresponding to it is “hamarskift,” which may possibly be connected with throwing the hammer in order to mark the boundary of land occupied by a man's strength. The two principal features of forni or hamar skift are the irregularity of the resulting shapes of plots and the temporary character of then: occupation. The first observation may be substantiated by a description like that of Laasby in Jutland: “These lands are to that extent scattered and intermixed by the joint owners that it cannot be said for certain what (or how much) they are.” Swedish documents, on the other hand, speak expressly of practices of shifting arable and meadows periodically, sometimes year by year.

Now the uncertainty of these practices based on occupation became in process of time a most inconvenient feature of the situation and evidently led to constant wrangling as to rights and boundaries. The description of Laasby which I have just quoted ends with the significant remark: “They should be compelled to make allotment by the cord.” This making of allotments by the cord is the process of rebning, from reb, the surveyor's cord, and the juridical procedure necessary for it was called “solskift”—because it was a division following the course of the sun.

The two fundamental positions from which this form of allotment proceeds are: (1) that the whole area of the village is common land (faellesjord), which has to be lotted out to the single householders; (2) that the partition should result in the creation of equal holdings of normal size (bóls). In some cases we can actually recognize the effect of these allotments by ancient solskift in the 18th century, at a time when the Danish enclosure acts produced a second general revolution in land tenure.

The oldest twelve inhabitants, elected as sworn arbitrators for effecting the allotment, begin their work by throwing together into one mass all the grounds owned by the members of the community, including dwellings and farm-buildings, with the exception of some privileged plots. There is a close correspondence between the sites of houses and the shares in the field. The first operation of the surveyors consists in marking out a village green for the night-rest and pasture of the cattle employed in the tillage (fortá), and to assign sites to the houses of the coparceners with orchards append ant to them (tofts); every householder getting exactly as much as his neighbour. From the tofts they proceed to the fields on the customary notion that the toft is the mother of the field. The fields are disposed into furlongs and shots, as they were called in England, and divided among the members of the village with the strictest possible equality. This is effected by assigning to every householder a strip in every one of the furlongs constituting the arable of the village. Meadows were often treated as lot-meadows in the same way as in England. According to the account of a solrebning executed in 1513 (Oester Hoejsted), every otting, the eighth part of a ból (corresponding to the English oxgang or bovate), got a toft of 40 roods in length and 6 in breadth. One of the coparceners received, however, 8 roods because his land was worse than that of his neighbours. Of the arable there were allotted to each otting two roods' breadth for the plough in each furlong and append ant commons “in damp and in dry”—in meadow and pasture. After such a “solskift” the peasants held their tenements in undisturbed ownership, but the eminent demesne of the village was recognized and a revision of the allotment was possible. Many such revisions did actually take place, and in such cases all rights and claims were apportioned according to the standard of the original shares. Needless to say that these shares were subjected to all the usual limitations of champion farming.

After having said so much about different types of village communities which occur in Europe it will be easier to analyse the incidents of English land tenure which disclose the working of similar conceptions and arrangements. Features which have been very prominent in the case of the Welsh, Slavs, Germans or Scandinavians recur in the English instances sometimes with equal force and at other times in a mitigated shape.

There are some vestiges of the purely tribal form of community on English soil. Many of the place-names of early Saxon and Anglican settlements are derived from personal names with the suffix ing, as designations like Oakington, the town of the Hockings.

True, it is just possible to explain some of these place-names as pointing to settlements belonging to some great man and therefore taking their designation from him with the adjunct of an ing indicating possession. But the group of words in question falls in exactly with the common patronymics of Saxon and German families and kindreds, and therefore it is most probable, as Kemble supposed, that we have to do in most of these instances with tribal and family settlements, although the mere fact of belonging to a great landowner or a monastery may have been at the root of some cases.

A very noticeable consequence of tribal habits in regard to landownership is presented by the difficulties which stood in the way of alienation of land by the occupiers of it. The Old English legal system did not originally admit of any alienation of folkland, land held by folk right, or, in other words, of the estates owned under the ordinary customary law of the people. Such land could not be bequeathed out of the kindred and could not be sold without the consent of the kinsmen. Such complete disabilities could not be upheld indefinitely, however, in a growing and progressive community, and we find the ancient folk right assailed from different points of view. The Church insists on the right of individual possessors to give away land for the sake of their souls; the kings grant exemption from folkright and constitute privileged estates held by book and following in the main the rules of individualized Roman law; the wish of private persons to make provision for daughters and to deal with land as with other commodities produces constant collisions with the customary tribal views. Already, by the end of the Saxon period transfer and alienation of land make their way everywhere, and the Norman conquest brings these features to a head by substituting the notion of tenure—that is, of an estate burdened with service to a superior—for the ancient notion of tribal folkland.

But although the tribal basis of communal arrangements was shaken and removed in England in comparatively early times, it had influenced the practices of rural husbandry and landholding, and in the modified form of the village community it survived right through the feudal period, leaving characteristic and material traces of its existence down to the present day.

To begin with, the open-field system with intermixture of strips and common rights in pasture and wood has been the prevailing system in England for more than a thousand years. Under the name of champion farming it existed everywhere in the country until the Inclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries put an end to it; it may be found in operation even now in some of its features in backward districts. It would have been absurd to build up these practices of compulsory rotation of crops, of a temporary relapse of plots into common pasture between harvest and ploughing time, of the interdependence of thrifty and negligent husbandmen in respect of weeds and times of cultivation, &c., from the point of view of individual appropriation. On the other hand, it was the natural system for the apportionment of claims to the shareholders of an organic and perpetual joint-stock company.

Practices of shifting arable are seldom reported in English evidence. There are some traces of periodical redivisions of arable land in Northumberland: under the name of runrig system such practices seem to have been not uncommon in the outer fields, the non-manured portions of townships in Scotland, both among the Saxon inhabitants of the lowlands and the Celtic population of the highlands. The joining of small tenants for the purpose of coaration, for the formation of the big,