第99章

On the basis of this estimation an exchange was effected. In the time of the war (perhaps the rebellion of 1173) the eight hides and other hides in Segheho were encroached upon and appropriated unrighteously by many, and for this reason a general revision of the holdings was undertaken before Walter de Wahull and Hugh de la Lege in full court by six old men; it was made out to which of the hides the several acres belonged. At that time, when all the tenants in Segheho (knights, freeholders, and others) did not know exactly about the land of the village and the tenements, and when each man was contending that his neighbours held unrighteously and more than they ought, all the people decided by common agreement and in the presence of the lords de Wahull and de la Lege, that everybody should surrender his land to be measured anew with the rood by the old men as if the ground had been occupied afresh: every one had to receive his due part on consideration of his rights. At that time R.F. admitted that he and his predecessors had held the area near the castle unrighteously. The men in charge of the distribution divided that area into sixteen strips (buttos), and these were divided as follows: there are eight hides of villain land in Segheho and to each two strips were apportioned.

The narrative is curious in many respects. it illustrates beautifully the extent to which the intermixture of plots was carried, and the inconveniences consequent upon it. Although the land had been measured and divided at the time when the lord de Wahull took the land, everything got into confusion at the time of the civil war, and the disputes originated not in violence from abroad but in encroachments of the village people among themselves: the owners of conterminous strips were constantly quarrelling. A new division became necessary, and it took place under circumstances of great solemnity, as a result of an agreement effected at a great meeting of the tenantry before both lords. The new distribution may stand for all purposes in lieu of the original parcelling of the land on fresh occupation. The mode of treating one of the areas shows that the intermixture of the strips was a direct consequence of the attempt to equalise the portions. instead of putting the whole of this area into one lot, the old men divide it into strips and assign to every great holding, to every hide, two strips of this area. Many inconveniences follow for some of the owners, e.g. for the church which, it is complained, cannot put its plot to any use on account of its lying far away, and in intermixture with other people's land. But the guiding principle of equal apportionment has found a suitable expression.

We may turn now from the analysis of this case to general considerations. The important point in the instance quoted was, that the assignment of scattered strips to every holding depended on the wish to equalise the shares of the tenants. I think it may be shown that the treatment adopted in Segheho was the most natural, and therefore the most widely-spread one. To begin with, what other form of allotment appears more natural in a crude state of society? To employ a simile which I have used already, the territory of the township is not like a homogeneous sheet of paper out of which you may cut lots of every desirable shape and size: the tilth will present all kinds of accidental features, according to the elevation of the ground, the direction of the watercourses and ways, the quality of the soil, the situation of dwellings, the disposition of wood and pasture-ground, etc. The whole must needs be dismembered into component parts, into smaller areas or furlongs, each stretching over land of one and the same condition, and separated from land of different quality and situation. Over the irregular squares of this rough chess-board a more or less entangled network of rights and interests must be extended. There seem to be only two ways of doing it: if you want the holding to lie in one compact patch you will have to make a very complicated reckoning of all the many circumstances which influence husbandry, will have to find some numerical expression for fertility, accessibility, and the like;or else you may simply give every householder a share in every one of the component areas, and subject him in this way to all the advantages and drawbacks which bear upon his neighbours. If the ground cannot be made to fit the system of allotment, the system must conform itself to the ground. There can be no question that the second way of escaping from the difficulty is much the easier one, and very suitable to the practice of communities in an early stage of development. This second way leads necessarily to a scattering and an intermixture of strips.

The explanation is wide enough to meet the requirements of cases placed in entirely different local surroundings and historical connexions; the tendency towards an equalising of the shares of the tenantry is equally noticeable in England and in Russia, in the far west and in the far east of Europe. In Russia we need not even go into history to find it operating in the way described;the practice is alive even now.