Town, Township and Tithing. 151 



the tun, enclosed with a hedge — a higher development upon the same 

 general lines. But there was one point of contrast of vital moment. The 

 Greek or Italian city, even if of no greater extent and population than an 

 English town, was a sovereign state; the English town, however large and 

 populous, was only a municipality, a part of a larger organism. 



The word that is used in the Latin documents of the middle ages as mean- 

 ing "town"' is villa (or vlllata) — a word that has had a curious and inter- 

 esting history. In classical Latin it means a country house — whether a 

 farm-house, villa rustica, or a gentleman's country seat, villa urbana. in 

 which sense it corresponds precisely to our modern word, villa. From 

 meaning " house" it came by a not long or difficult transition, to mean the 

 '• estate" surrounding the house; and in this sense we find the word used 

 in the later Roman empire. This was a period of great landed proper- 

 ties; but these properties, at least in Gaul, were not "plantations," Udifun- 

 dia, or vast and indefinite stretches of land, Hke the Dahymple farm. 

 Each great property was made up of a number of villas, not necessarily 

 contiguous, each of these villasheing a compact, organized estate of a mod- 

 erate size. The small peasants' estates had for the most part disappeared, 

 and Gaul at this epoch may be described as divided up into seignorial or 

 domanial estates, corresiaonding rouglily to the communes, or smallest 

 territorial divisions of modern France. These villas agreed in many im- 

 portant particulars with the English manors, being perhaps of about the 

 same extent, and being ruled autocra.tically by their owners. 



The important fact to be noted here is the change in the significance of 

 the word villa. From meaning a gentleman's country house, it has come 

 to mean the estate depending upon that house; that is to say, it has ac- 

 quired the meaning of a territorial district. And although the district thus 

 designated in Gaul is a seignorial estate, it is easy, when the word has once 

 become associated with the idea of an area of land, to extend its use to 

 other districts of similar extent and grade. Thus we find it applied even 

 on the continent to the Dorfschaft or village mark,' and in England it is 

 used to designate the townshii), whether free or seignorial. But that it is 

 the township that is thus designated, as a territorial area, and not the seig- 

 norial estate into which the township has been converted, is proved by the 

 important fact, already noticed, that the manor and the township {villa) are 

 not always identical. No argument, therefore, for the originally servile 

 character of the English tun can be drawn from the fact that tuu is in 

 Latin villa: for although in Gaul a villa was a seignorial estate, in England 

 it was not the estate as such, but an area of land, often identical with the 

 manor, but often containing two or more manors, or parts of manors, or 

 isolated pieces of land. 



Thus the word villa, having acquired the signification of a territorial 

 area, was used in England as the Latin equivalent of Tunscip. And as villa 



^ Van der Elindere, Notice sur I'orUjine des magistrats communaux. 



