652 ON THE COST OF CARRIAGE. 



This scattered character of the small estates seems to have 

 been due to a village system, which at one time prevailed in 

 England, perhaps in the earliest Saxon times only; which 

 lingered up to a late period in Russia, if indeed it be even 

 yet extinct; which still exists, we are informed, in India. 

 It was a kind of simple communism, in which the govern- 

 ment of the village or township was left in the hands of a 

 single individual or head man, who distributed the land for 

 the labour, and the produce for the support of the inhabitants, 

 the common pasture being set aside for the sustenance of 

 such cattle and sheep as could be maintained upon it. 



I am drawing, in the more important part of this sketch 

 at least, no imaginary or unreal picture. Many such villages, 

 (in which the manor-lands lay close together, and the rest of 

 the parish was divided into small estates, made up of scattered 

 fragments, and in which common rights of a very valuable 

 character existed,) were to be found at the beginning of the 

 present century, perhaps up to the close of that great Conti- 

 nental war, the effects of which, in deteriorating the condi- 

 tion of the great mass of the people, though hinted at by 

 Mr. Porter, have never been thoroughly expounded. 



If any of my readers were to ramble through a Hampshire 

 or Sussex village, which is as yet remote from the full effect 

 of modern changes, he will see that some marks of this ancient 

 distribution of land are yet uneffaced, in the numerous home- 

 steads and small farm-yards now occupied by day labourers. 

 In my native village in Hampshire, the area of which is nearly 

 4000 acres, one-half at least being woodland and down, I can, 

 with no great effort of memory, recall 25 such homesteads; 

 and 1 feel sure that such a recollection by no means exhausts 

 the number. Nearly all these houses, built perhaps about 150 

 years ago, when there were county freeholders, are now oc- 

 cupied in tenements by agricultural labourers, the descendants 

 of those ancient freeholders. They are all in one shape ; a 

 substantial brick building, containing a large room on the 

 ground-floor, with its bacon-rack fastened to the unplastered 



