Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/352

314 or present existence of the compact village community found in great perfection in the not very distant Punjab plains.

The effect of this evidence is, I think, to suggest hesitation in asserting anything like an exclusively Roman origin of the manor or fief. And, again, if we suppose that in England the manorial group succeeded the village group, and that one element in the change was that the waste or common-land of the community became the lord's waste, we can see, from the tight hold of the hill Rajas on the forests and uncultivated lands which never belonged to any village community, that, to say the least, this supposition supplies no exhaustive theory of the origin of institutions of a manorial type. On the other hand, this evidence, and much more evidence which might be adduced from many parts of India, confirms the view that in many old tribal societies there was a propulsion towards feudalism exhibiting itself independently of those forces of Roman law and Roman administration which gave it a new character and a new direction.

The truth, however, is that these hill principalities and others which existed in Oudh before our day are more like the French fiefs than the English manors.

As regards the Oudh principalities, which have been described in Mr. Benett's Gonda Settlement Report, I may say that I have carefully compared his list of quasi-feudal dues levied by the Gonda Rajas with the elaborate list of feudal rights given in Note E of De Tocqueville's France before the Revolution. The Gonda dues included tolls on beasts of burden bringing goods to bazaars, on ferries, bridges, and roads, besides the Raja's share of the produce. To each of these there is a parallel in De Tocqueville's list; and there are many other resemblances of a less obvious description that it would take time to explain. I would express the result by saying that if we did not know historically that France was at one time honeycombed with petty states, each enjoying a certain measure of sovereignty, we might, from the comparison of these lists, have inferred it as a certainty.

I must pass on quickly now to the process of feudalisation. What were the circumstances and motives that, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, converted allodial lands into feudal lands? Why chiefly in France, but also in Italy and Germany, were lands surrendered by their proprietors to be received back again