Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/351

Rh hawks, of working water-mills, of setting up fish-weirs. The artisans holding garden-plots of the Raja were bound to service to him only. The landholders were also liable to be pressed into service military or menial. All waste lands, great and small, were the Raja's waste; parts of the forests were his shooting-preserves; trees could not be felled, nor could new fields be formed out of the waste, without his permission. "All rights", says Sir James Lyall, "were supposed to come from the Raja; several rights . . from his grant, and rights of common from his sufferance."

Now let us set beside this account a description of an English manor. I will quote that given by Sir Fred. Pollock at page 128 of his Oxford Lectures: "The English manor", he says, "as we find it from the Conquest downwards, included the lord, the free tenants who held of the lord by regular feudal tenure and owed suit to the court, and the villeins or customary tenants who held land according to the custom of the manor on villenage or base tenure, being generally bound not only to make stated payments in kind, but to furnish work on the lord's own land at stated times." The pattern of society here depicted is in much sharper lines. Both the theories and practice of lawyers, both legal definition and the regular working of regularly constituted courts of justice, have here given an amount of system and rigidity to classes of people connected with the land, and to their rights and duties, which it would be an error to seek in old hill-states where there were no lawyers, and practically no law but custom and the will of the chief; and where the absence of any distinction between judicial and executive authority, and of even so much as the idea of legal, as opposed to customary, precedent, made it impossible for the rude tribunals of the Rajas to give to social combinations any greater distinctness than they spontaneously acquired. Nevertheless, the similarities are striking; in both cases you have the land as the basis of a complete social group; in both cases the proprietary rights of the chief or lord are intermixed with his rights of jurisdiction; in both cases the permanent rights of others in the land are associated with obligations of military or personal service. And these resemblances are the more worthy of attention because the Indian example occurs where no sort of Roman influence ever operated, and where there is no trace of the past