Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/184

 the village, by its headman, who knew the capability of payment of each individual; this procedure was known as the « cisla ». The schoolmaster was also appointed by the village, as was the practice in Transylvania, under Hungarian rule, up to modern times. Some traces of economic community of goods survived up to very recent times, e. g., in the usufruct of the forests, lakes and waste-lands.

Religion itself preserved this local character during the first centuries after the foundation of the Roumanian race. The priests, known as preoți (from the Latin: presbyter. In Albanian it is prevt) or popi (from the Latin), had often no canonical consecration. Some were theological teachers by hereditary right, being the sons of priests; in Transylvania whole priestly lines were formed in this way. Others had sought consecration from the superiors of the monasteries, who played the part of the chorepiscopi in Gaul. Others, again, were consecrated by the Slavonic bishops on the right bank of the Danube. Thanks to this, not only the Cyrillic alphabet, but the old Bulgarian language, the « Slavonic », tongue of the gospels and of the liturgy, found their way into the Roumanian church. When the two States of Wallachia and Moldavia took definite shape, the princes received from Constantinople a regular, canonical form of the church, which was made official. The influence of the bishops and archbishop-metropolitans was, however, weak to the last among the secular clergy who, based on the village autonomy, constituted one of the great forces of the State.

Yet the Roumanian villagers were able to make of their natural community, of their mediaeval « Roumania », not only a State, but a free government on a democratic basis; the whole nation developed its forms of historical and natural liberty. In the beginning of the 14th century all «