ON LAND TENURE IN ANCIENT TIMES. 169 
Tenure in Various Countries, says that the ancient form of 
tenure and tillage in Russia “ was that of the joint-husbandry 
of a whole village. The village not the family was the 
social unit. Supplanting the family for purposes of colonisa- 
tion, the village, by necessity partook to a certain extent of 
the character of a family. It stood under patriarchal rule. 
Movable property alone was individual, immovable, the land 
at least, was common. With the alien not belonging to the 
village, not the individual, the village only has to do. The 
village always had a Mother-village, and the Mother-village 
again had a Mother-village, and so on. The name of Mother- 
village in general, or of Mother-village to another village is 
still attached to many Russian towns and villages.”* 
Sir Henry Sumner Maine tells us that “there appears to 
be no country inhabited by an Aryan race in which traces do 
not remain of the ancient periodical redistribution.”f In 
England he tells us this prevails more or less in all parts, but 
more abundantly in some counties than in others. These 
lands are known by various names. “When the soil is 
arable, they are most usually called ‘common,’ ‘ common- 
able, or ‘open’ fields, or sometimes simply ‘intermixed’ 
lands. When the lands are in grass, they are sometimes 
known as ‘lot meadows,’ sometimes as ‘lammas_ lands,’ 
though the last expression is occasionally used of arable 
soil. . . . The several shares in the arable fields, sometimes, 
but very rarely, shift from one owner to another in each 
successive year; but this is frequently the rule with the 
meadows, which, when they are themselves in a state of 
severalty, are often distributed once a year by casting lots 
amongst the persons entitled to appropriate and enclose 
them, or else change from one possessor to another in the 
order of the names of persons or tenements on a roll... . 
Common fields and common meadows are still plentiful on 
all sides of us,”{ though in the last 170 years vast numbers 
of such commonable fields have been enclosed, especially 
since the Common Fields Enclosure Act passed in 1836.§ 
* Systems of Land Tenure in Many Lands, pp. 362, 363. Mac- 
millan & Co., 1871. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures certain de- 
pendent villages are called “the daughters of ” others, which are spoken 
of as feminine, and therefore as the “mothers,” “mother-cities,” or 
“mother-villages” of these smaller dependent places. Thus we read of 
“Ekron and her daughters (APsy5).” (Joshua xv. 45. See also Joshua 
xv. 47; xvii. 11; Judges i. 27; xi. 26; &c.) 
+ Village-Communities in the East and West, p. 82. 
{t Ibid., pp. 85, 86, 88. : : 
§ Nearly 4,000 enclosure Acts were passed between 1760 and 1844! 
