r228 



KNOWLEDGE. 



[October 1, 1890. 



fore beeu fully justified in entrusting the volume on 

 Village Communities to an expert who has earned for 

 himself a title to respectful audience. 



It may be said at once that Mr. Gomme's book is full of 

 curious and interesting matter, diligently gleaned from 

 sources often obscure, and sometimes inaccessible to 

 ordinary students. Unreserved commendation may be 

 given to several of the chaptcis, especially those dealing 

 with archaic customs relating to allotments of land in 

 common fields, to co-operative tillage, the rights of com- 

 moners, and the gradual transformation of communal 

 rights into freehold or coiiyhold tenures. The account of cer- 

 tain nuuiicipal customs in London, and of the punishment 

 of oil'ences against customary law, are also valuable and 

 interesting. So, too, is the explanation of tiie duplicate 

 municipal jurisdiction which prevailed at Eochester, the 

 extramural community at Boley Hill being probably of 

 Danish origin, and governed by its ow'n laws and officers, 

 subordinate to the rule of the intramural Saxon community. 

 Mr. Gomme omits, however, the still more striking case 

 of Exeter, where Mr. Kerslake has succeeded in delimita- 

 ting the boundaries of the Celtic and Saxon communities 

 which dw'elt side by side within the walls. 



So long as Mr. Gomme confines himself to matters as 

 to which he is acknowledged to be an expert, we may 

 follow- him with confidence. But when he attempts to 

 fulfil the promise given on his title-page, of dealing with 

 the "origin" of village communities, he is entangled by 

 ethnological and anthropological problems with which he 

 is less competent to deal. He defines it as " the special 

 object of the iDresent inq\;iry to establish, if possible, that 

 the pre-Celtic inhabitants of this island must have lent 

 their aid in the fashioning of British institutions" 

 (p. 295). This being " the special object " of his book, by 

 his success or failure in this attempt the book must be 

 judged ; and the verdict must reluctantly be pronounced 

 that the attempt has altogether failed. Mr. Gomme 

 believes that our village communities are to be traced to 

 what he calls an "Iberic" origin. But he adduces no 

 evidence as to the nature of Iberic institutions in the 

 lands where, if anywhere, they may have survived — in 

 Corsica, Sardinia, Spain, Auvergne, Southern Italy, or 

 among the Basques and the Kabyles. Instead of this he 

 gbes for his type of " Iberic " institutions to the non- 

 Aryan bin tribes of India, who have never been supposed, 

 even by the wildest of ethnologists, to have any connection 

 with the Iberians. 



In endeavouring to discriminate between what he calls 

 the Aryan and the pre-Aryan institutions of Britain, Mr. 

 Gomme refers continually to the Indian communities, but 

 he does not describe or discuss the Eussian niir, which 

 presents, even in our own day, an almost perfect exaniiile 

 of the unchanged village community whose institutions 

 he is stri^•ing to deduce from Indian parallels and obscure 

 I'-nglish survivals. He actually quotes from Sir Hemy 

 I\Iaine the statement that these Eussian commimities have 

 survived in a more archaic state than those of India (p. 202), 

 but he inexcusably excuses himself from investigating them 

 on the ground that, owing to the limits of his work, " there 

 has been no opportunity of examing the village commu- 

 nity as it sur\-ives in the Eussian wir " (p. 295). Avoiding 

 the groimd on which he might have trod firmly, namely, 

 a comparison between the village institutions of the 

 liasques and other Iberian peoples on the one hand, and 

 those of Eussia on the other, he goes ofl' on a Quixotic 

 endeavour to establish analogies between the non-Aryan 

 village life of India, Borneo, Fiji, and South Africa, and 

 what he conceives to be survivals of the pre-Aryan institu- 

 tions of Eng^iaiid. 



He shows reasons for believing that in our own village 

 institutions we may detect traces of the existence, side by 

 side, of a conquering race and a subject race. The con- 

 quering race he identifies with the Aryan invaders, and the 

 subject race witli neolithic tribes of Iberian or Silurian 

 blood. The whole of this argument is vitiated by two 

 fundamental fallacies, from which a more intimate ac- 

 quaintance with recent ethnologic and anthropologic 

 investigations would have saved him. In the first place 

 he takes for granted the now exploded doctrine that Aryan 

 blood is co-extensive with Aryan speech, and therefore 

 that both Celts and Teutons are alike Aryans by race, 

 whereas few anthropologists would now admit that the 

 dolichocephalic Teutons could have belonged to the same 

 race as the brachycephalic Celts. Before drawing any 

 comparison between the institutions of India and England, 

 it is necessary to determine whether the Indian Aryans 

 are cognate with the Celts or the Teutons. Cognate with 

 both they cannot be. In fact, almost all the anomalies 

 which Mr. Gomme refers to the contact of Aryans and 

 Iberians on our shores may be explained as being due to 

 contact between Celts and Teutons. 



Mr. Gomme's second fallacy is the identification of the 

 pre-Aryan races with the neolithic people ; w'hereas it may 

 now be regarded as established that the Aryan invaders 

 w-ere themselves in the neolithic stage of culture when 

 they reached our shores. Mr. Gomme's neolithic Iberians 

 turn out, therefore, to be merely Celts still in the neolithic 

 stage. Not only were the early Aryan occupants of Europe 

 a pastoral neolithic people, but it is also certain that the 

 Aryan mvaders of India were merely pastoral nomads who 

 had not reached the settled agricultural stage. The 

 undivided Aryans must have separated before they had 

 learned the use of metals, and before they settled in vil- 

 lages or had framed the laws and customs regulating 

 tillage, which are needed in agricultural communities. 

 Hence all parallels between the Aryan agriculture and 

 the Aryan village institutions in India and in England 

 are necessarily fallacious. Both must have grown ttp at 

 a time subsequent to the pastoral stage, during which 

 the separation of the Aryan races must have taken 

 place. 



Mr. Gomme not only compares the Aryan village organi- 

 zations in India and England, wdiich must necessarily 

 have arisen independently, but he constantly draws 

 parallels between the non-Aryan hill tribes of India and the 

 people who built the forts and earthworks on the hills of 

 Britam, and whom he unhesitatingly regards as Iberians. 

 But these earthworks on our hills, from their relation to 

 pre-existing Eoman roads, can in some cases be shown to 

 be actually post-Eoman. The hill-folk of Gaul were un- 

 doubtedly in many cases, if not invariably, of Celtic race, 

 and it is highly probable that the people who in Britain 

 must have defended themselves in hill forts against in- 

 vaders were Celts, who resisted either the Eomans or the 

 mvading Anglo-Saxons, and not Iberians who resisted the 

 invading Celts. Arclnuology suisplies no evidence what- 

 ever that the pre-Celtic people of Britain were capable of 

 constructing the vast earthworks which crown so many of 

 our hills, whereas we know, in many instances, that they 

 were built by Celts. Mr. Gomme's main thesis must 

 therefore be held to have broken down completely. No 

 trustworthy evidence has as yet been brought forward to 

 show that the origin of the village communities in Eng- 

 land can be referred to the pre-Aryan Iberic people of 

 Britain. If Mr. Gomme had been content to eschew such 

 startling theories — improbable, unproved, and probably 

 unprovable — and had satisfied himself with giving a digest, 

 which his ample erudition would have enabled him to do. 



