2 
170 JAMES NEIL, M.A., 
Mr. William Marshall, a voluminous writer on agriculture 
between 1770 and 1820, who “has left an account of the 
state of cultivation in almost every English county,” speaks 
very plainly to this effect m a number of his works. As 
summed up by Nasse of Bonn, his statements declare that in 
his time, only some eighty years back, “in almost all parts 
of the country, im the Midland and Eastern Counties particu- 
larly, but also in the West—n Wiltshire for example—in the 
South, as in Surrey, in the North, as in Yorkshire, there are 
extensive open and common fields. Out of 316 parishes m 
Northamptonshire, 89 are in this condition ; more than a 100 
in Oxfordshire ; about 50,000 acres in Warwickshire ; in 
Berkshire, half the county; more than half of Wiltshire; in 
Huntingdonshire, out of a total area of 240,000 acres, 130,000 
were commonable meadows, commons, and common fields.”* 
Some of these common fields were so extensive that the 
pasturage on the dividing balks of turf, which were not 
more than 3 yards wide, was estimated in one case at 
80 acres. Indeed our words “ commonalty” and “ commons,” 
as in “ House of Commons,” and in the expression “ Commons 
of the Realm,” and “yeoman” from the German gemein, 
“common,” doubtless owe their derivation to a body of 
peasant proprietors having real property in common, that is, 
the dwellers in Village-Communities, who formed originally 
the mass of men in all lands. 
Writing four years later in 1875, Sir Henry Sumner Maine 
alludes to further corroborative evidence of the universal 
existence in primitive times of related Village-Communities 
holding the land in common with a periodical redistribution, 
and that even amongst races other than Aryan. He says, 
«“ We at length know something concerning the beginnings 
of the great institution of Propertyin Land. The collective 
ownership of the soil by groups of men either in faet united 
by blood-relationship, or believing or assuming that they are 
so united, is now entitled to take rank as an ascertained 
primitive phenomenon, once universally characterismg those 
communities of mankind between whose civilisation and our 
own there is any distinct connection or analogy. The 
evidence has been found on all sides of us, dimly seen and 
verifiable with difficulty in countries which have undergone 
the enormous pressure of the Roman Empire, or which have 
* Ueber die mittelalterliche Feldgemeinschaft und die Eingehungen 
des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts in England, by Professor E. Nasse, Bonn, 
p. 4. 
