Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/57

II the waste land, or pasturage, which is entirely common to the families, each having the right of feeding so many head of cattle on it; and the arable land, which is divided up into parcels or strips, and is either redistributed to the various families at regular intervals of time, or has become by degrees apportioned to them permanently. Traces of this system of common pasturage and divided arable land may still be seen in the records and maps of a very large number of English parishes.

Fourthly, the ancient village community had, we may be quite sure, a common worship. Where Christianity has supervened, as in existing European village communities, of course very few traces of this can be found. But the Indian poetess quoted by Sir H. Maine was no doubt representing a general fact when she spoke of the larger crystal in the middle of the group which represented the temple of the god. Whether that god was in all cases the divine ancestor from whom the whole group believed itself to be descended, it is not possible to determine; but the universal prevalence in early society of the worship of ancestors by groups of kin — a feature which must be passed over here — makes it probable that this was so. Whatever the worship was, we may be certain that, as an essential part of the life of the community, it was shared by all its members. The four chief characteristics of the early village community are thus — kinship of all the members;