130 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 



THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY AND SERFDOM IN ENGLAND. 



By Prof. WM. F. ALLEN. 



The existence of village communities with collective ownership of land, 

 in England, is a fact of comparatively recent discovery. Long after von Mau- 

 rer and the writers of his school had submitted the subject to an exhaustive 

 investigation, in relation to the Teutonic countries of the continent, it was 

 believed that England afforded no examples of the system. The eye of the 

 American traveler upon the continent is constantly struck by the ribbon- 

 like strips which almost everywhere testify to a system of occupation and 

 cultivation of land differing widely from that of his own country; while in 

 England the fields, of irregular size and shape — although enclosed with 

 hedges instead of stone walls and rail fences — are precisely what he is fa- 

 miliar with at home. It was only after the inquiry was, so to speak, com- 

 pleted for the continent, that a German scholar. Prof. E. Nasse, of Bonn, 

 took it up in relation to England, and showed that here, too, the system 

 of village communities, with an open-field system of husbandry, was the 

 prevailing one during the middle ages.' 



The line of inquiry entered upon by Prof. Nasse in the work referred to, 

 was shortly after followed out by Sir Henry Maine in his ' ' Village Com- 

 munities," (1871); and more recently Mr. Frederick Seebohm, in his 

 " English Village Communities," (1883), has given a description and analy- 

 sis of this institution which could not be surpassed in thoroughness and 

 lucidity. Since the publication of this work, in 1883, there has no longer 

 been any room for difference of opinion as to the existence of village com. 

 munities in England, or indeed as to their organization in almost the small- 

 est detail. A new controversy has, however, been suggested by his work. 

 Mr. Seebohm holds that these village «communi ties were not, in their origin, 

 groups of free peasant proprietors, reduced by gradual steps to a condition 

 of serfdom, as the accepted theory maintains, but that serfdom was their orig- 

 inal condition, there having been no essential change in this respect from the 

 first settlement of England down through the feudal period. This view is 

 closely connected with Mr. Seebohm's theory of the primitive aristocracy of 



1 See his treatise, translated and published by the Cobden Club: The Agricultural Com- 

 munity of the Middle Ages, and Inclosures of the Sixteenth Century in England. Lon- 

 don: Williams & Norgate, 1872. 



