178 JAMES NEIL, M.A., 
the bovate. This, and this alone, would ‘give the requisite 
elasticity to the system so as to allow, if necessary, of the 
admission of new comers into the Village-Community, and 
new virgates into the village fields. So long as the limits of 
the land were not reached a fresh tenant would rob no one 
by adding his oxen to the village plough-teams, and receiving 
in regular turn the strips allotted in the ploughing to his 
oxen. In the working of the system the strips of a new 
holding would be intermixed with the others by a perfectly 
natural process. Now that something like this process did 
actually happen in Saxon times is clear from the way in 
which the Church was provided for under the Saxon 
laws.”* 
It is not necessary to go into that part of Mr. Seebohm’s 
work where he labours with much learning and ingenuity 
to show that G. L. von Maurer is wrong in his theory of the 
original German mark and free Village-Community, and that 
“what looks at first sight so much like a German free Village- 
Community was a little Roman vicus.” Whether Roman or 
German the mark on the Continent, like the manor in 
England, possessed distorted but clearly traceable remains of 
the Village-Community with its arable land lying in open 
fields, held and ploughed in common, and constantly re- 
allotted amongst the native tillers of the soil, all of which are 
features of that farm life which the changeless East has so 
minutely preserved, and which, in its exceedingly primitive 
simplicity, carries us back at one leap two thousand years 
behind the Roman Empire. 
Though as we have seen, in India, these Village-Commu- 
nities formerly existed everywhere, the unavoidable intro= 
duction of our legal ideas of sovereignty, command, duty, 
right, and sanction, utterly subversive of their system, but 
inseparable from modern ideas of law and order, have been 
inevitably modifying and breaking them up. This has occa- 
sioned a great part of the difficulty we have met with in 
ruling that vast Eastern Empire,—for there is no earth- 
hunger, no attachment to custom, and no antipathy to the 
interference of strangers in matters social, political, legal, 
fiscal, and religious greater than that which is to be found 
in these ancient, highly exclusive, and exceedingly con- 
servative Village-Communities. Powerful oriental monarchs 
formerly, as they do now—and this must from time to time 
have been as much the case in the kingdom of Israel as in 
* The English Village Community, pp. 118, 114. 
