738 THE RURAL COMMUNITY 



even under the most favorable conditions of settling, had lost the 

 support given to him, also in the feudal period, by firm traditions, 

 the old mutual protection, the jurisdiction of the community in the 

 Weistumer in the west. The regularly more numerous Slavonian 

 peasantry did not know anything of such traditions. Besides, in the 

 west regularly the parcels of which the estates of the lords consisted, 

 because they had gradually arisen upon originally free land, were 

 intermingled even in single villages; they crossed everywhere the 

 patrimonial rights of the small owners of territory and thus they 

 secured for the peasant, by their variety and mutual conflicts, his toil- 

 some existence; very frequently the peasant was politically, person- 

 ally, and economically subjected to quite different lords. In the east 

 the combination of lordship and patrimonial rights over a whole vil- 

 lage was in the hand of one lord; the formation of a "manor," in 

 the English sense, was regularly facilitated because much more fre- 

 quently, from the very beginning, but one knight's court had been 

 founded in a village or had originated already from the Slavonian 

 social constitution. And finally there is an important factor, upon 

 which Professor von Below correctly lays special stress: the estate 

 of the knights in the east, though at first small in proportion to the 

 entire territory of a village, was nevertheless usually much larger than 

 was customary in the west. Therefore, the enlargement of the culti- 

 vation of his estate was, foi the lord, not only much more easy than 

 in the west, but also a much less remote idea. Thus from the very 

 beginning there existed, in the method of the distribution of the land, 

 the first inducement to differentiation between east and west. But 

 this difference of the size of the original estate of the landlord was 

 connected, as to its causes, with differences between the economic 

 conditions of the east and those of the west; even in the Middle Ages 

 considerably different conditions of existence were thus created for 

 the ruling social class. 



The west was more densely settled, and, which is decisive in our 

 opinion, local communication, the exchange of goods within and 

 between the smallest local communities, was undoubtedly more 

 developed than in the east. This becomes evident by the fact that 

 the west was so much more densely settled with towns. It is based 

 partly upon the simple historical fact that the culture of the west 

 was, in each respect, older, partly upon a less evident, but important 

 geographical difference, the far greater variety of the agricultural 

 division of the west in comparison with the east. Considered from 

 a purely technical view, the communication on the extended plains 

 of the German east must have met with less impediments than in 

 the much intersected and differentiated territory of the west. But 

 such technical possibilities of communication do not determine the 

 measure of exchange; on the contrary, because, in the west and 



