Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

ever asking any aid from the Government, or uttering the slightest complaint ; they considered it as a natural duty. And while among the European settlers all kind of police measures were taken to prevent thefts and disorder resulting from such an influx of strangers, nothing of the kind was required on the Kabyles' territory : the djemmdas needed neither aid nor pro- tection from without.^ I can only cursorily mention two other most inter- esting features of Kabyle life ; namely, the anaya, or protection granted to wells, canals, mosques, market- places, some roads, and so on, in case of war, and the gofs. In the anaya we have a series of institutions both for diminishing the evils of war and for pre- venting conflicts. Thus the market-place is anaya, especially if it stands on a frontier and brings Kabyles and strangers together ; no one dares disturb peace in the market, and if a disturbance arises, it is quelled at once by the strangers who have gathered in the market town. The road upon which the women go from the village to the fountain also is anaya in case of war ; and so on. As to the gof, it is a widely- spread form of association, having some characters of the mediaeval Biirgschaften or Gegilden, as well as of societies both for mutual protection and for various purposes — intellectual, political, and emotional^which cannot be satisfied by the territorial organization of the village, the clan, and the confederation. The gof knows no territorial limits ; it recruits its members in various villages, even among strangers ; and it pro-

1 Hanoteau et Letourneux, La Kabylie, ii. 58. The same respect to strangers is the rule with the Mongols. The Mongol who has refused his roof to a stranger pays the full blood-compensation if the stranger has suffered therefrom (Bastian, Der Mensch in der Ge- schichte, iii. 231). tects them in all possible eventualities of life. Alto- gether, it is an attempt at supplementing the territorial grouping by an extra-territorial grouping intended to give an expression to mutual affinities of all kinds across the frontiers. The free international association of individual tastes and ideas, which we consider as one of the best features of our own life, has thus its origin in barbarian antiquity.

The mountaineers of Caucasia offer another extremely instructive field for illustrations of the same kind. In studying the present customs of the Ossetes — their joint families and communes and their judiciary con- ceptions— Professor Kovalevsky, in a remarkable work on Modern Custom and Ancient Law was enabled step by step to trace the similar dispositions of the old barbarian codes and even to study the origins of feudalism. With other Caucasian stems we occasion- ally catch a glimpse into the origin of the village community in those cases where it was not tribal but originated from a voluntary union between families of distinct origin. Such was recently the case with some Khevsoure villages, the inhabitants of which took the oath of " community and fraternity." ^ In another part of Caucasus, Daghestan, we see the growth of feudal relations between two tribes, both maintaining at the same time their village communities (and even traces of the gentile " classes "), and thus giving a living illustration of the forms taken by the conquest of Italy and Gaul by the barbarians. The victori- ous race, the Lezghines, who have conquered several

1 N. Khoudadoff, " Notes on the Khevsoures," in Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Society, xiv. i, Tiflis, 1890, p. 68. They also took the oath of not marrying girls from their own union, thus displaying a remarkable return to the old gentile rules. Georgian and Tartar villages in the Zakataly district, did not bring them under the dominion of separate families ; they constituted a feudal clan which now in- cludes 12,000 households in three villages, and owns in common no less than twenty Georgian and Tartar villages. The conquerors divided their own land among their clans, and the clans divided it in equal parts among the families ; but they did not interfere with the djemmdas of their tributaries which still practise the habit mentioned by Julius Caesar ; namely, the djemmda decides each year which part of the communal territory must be cultivated, and this land is divided . into as many parts as there are families, and the parts are distributed by lot. It is worthy of note that although proletarians are of common occurrence among the Lezghines (who live under a system of private property in land, and common ownership of serfs ^) they are rare arnong their Georgian serfs, who continue to hold their land in common. As to the customary law of the Caucasian mountaineers, it is much the same as that of the Longobards or Salic Franks, and several of its dis- positions explain a good deal the judicial procedure of the barbarians of old. Being of a very impression- able character, they do their best to prevent quarrels from taking a fatal issue ; so, with the Khevsoures, the swords are very soon drawn when a quarrel breaks out ; but if a woman rushes out and throws among them the piece of linen which she wears on her head, the swords are at once returned to their sheaths, and the quarrel is appeased. The head-dress

1 Dm. Bakradze, "Notes on the Zakataly District," in same Zapiski, xiv. i, p. 264. The " joint team " is as common among the Lezghines as it is among the Ossetes. of the women is anaya. If a quarrel has not been stopped in time and has ended in murder, the compen- sation money is so considerable that the aggressor is entirely ruined for his life, unless he is adopted by the wronged family ; and if he has resorted to his sword in a trifling quarrel and has inflicted wounds, he loses for ever the consideration of his kin. In all disputes, mediators take the matter in hand ; they select from among the members of the clan the judges — six in smaller affairs, and from ten to fifteen in more serious matters — and Russian observers testify to the absolute incorruptibility of the judges. An oath has such a significance that men enjoying general esteem are dispensed from taking it : a simple affirmation is quite Sufficient, the more so as in grave affairs the Khev- soure never hesitates to recognize his guilt (I mean, of course, the Khevsoure untouched yet by civilization). The oath is chiefly reserved for such cases, like disputes about property, which require some sort of appreciation in addition to a simple statement of facts ; and in such cases the men whose affirmation will decide in the dispute, act with the greatest circumspection. Altogether it is certainly not a want of honesty or of respect to the rights of the congeners which characterizes the barbarian societies of Caucasus, The stems of Africa offer such an immense variety of extremely interesting societies standing at all inter- mediate stages from the early village community to the despotic barbarian monarchies that I must abandon the idea of giving here even the chief results of a comparative study of their institutions.^ Suffice it to I See Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Oldenburg, 1887 ; Miin- zinger, Ueber das Recht und Sitten der Bogos, Winterthur, 1859; Casalis, Les Bassoutos, Paris, 1859; Maclean, Kafir Laws and Customs, Mount Coke, 1858, etc.

say, that, even under the most horrid despotism of kings, the folkmotes of the village communities and their customary law remain sovereign in a wide circle of affairs. The law of the State allows the king to take any one's life for a simple caprice, or even for simply satisfying his gluttony ; but the customary law of the people continues to maintain the same network of institutions for mutual support which exist among other barbarians or have existed among our ancestors. And with some better-favoured stems (in Bornu, Uganda, Abyssinia), and especially the Bogos, some of the dispositions of the customary law are inspired with really graceful and delicate feelings.

The village communities of the natives of both Americas have the same character. The Tupi of Brazil were found living in " long houses " occupied by whole clans which used to cultivate their corn and manioc fields in common. The Arani, much more advanced in civilization, used to cultivate their fields in common ; so also the Oucagas, who had learned under their system of primitive communism and " long houses " to build good roads and to carry on a variety of domestic industries,^ not inferior to those of the early mediaeval times in Europe. All of them were also living under the same customary law of which we have given specimens on the preceding pages. At another extremity of the world we find the Malayan feudalism, but this feudalism has been powerless to unroot the negaria, or village community, with its common ownership of at least part of the land, and the redistribution of land among the several negarias of the tribe. ^ With the Alfurus of Minahasa we find the

* Post's Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Familien-Rechts Oldenburg, 1889, pp. 270 seq. communal rotation of the crops ; with the I ndian stem of the Wyandots we have the periodical redis- tribution of land within the tribe, and the clan-culture of the soil ; and in all those parts of Sumatra where Moslem institutions have not yet totally destroyed the old organization we find the joint family (sukd) and the village community (koto) which maintains its right upon the land, even if part of it has been cleared without its authorization.^ But to say this, is to say that all customs for mutual protection and prevention of feuds and wars, which have been briefly indicated in the preceding pages as characteristic of the village' community, exist as well. More than that : the more fully .the communal possession of Iknd has been main- tained, the better and the gentler are the habits. Db, Stuers positively affirms that wherever the institution of the village community has been less encroached upon by the conquerors, the inequalities of fortunes are smaller, and the very prescriptions of the lex talionis are less cruel ; while, on the contrary, wher- ever the village community has been totally broken up, " the inhabitants suffer the most unbearable oppression from their despotic rulers." ^ This is quite natural. And when Waitz made the remark that those stems which have maintained their tribal confederations stand on a higher level of development and have a richer literature than those stems which have forfeited the old bonds of union, he only pointed out what might have been foretold in advance.

More illustrations would simply involve me in tedious repetitions — so strikingly similar are the barbarian 1 Powell, Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnography, Washing- ton, 1881, quoted in Post's Studien, p. 290 ; Bastian's Inselgruppen tn Oceanien, 1883, p. 88. societies under all climates and amidst all races. The same process of evolution has been going on in man- kind with a wonderful similarity. When the clan organization, assailed as it was from within by the separate family, and from without by the dismember- ment of the migrating clans and the necessity of taking in strangers of different descent — the village community, based upon a territorial conception, came into existence. This new institution, which had; naturally grown out of the preceding one — the clan — permitted the barbarians to pass through a most disturbed period of history without being broken into isolated families which would have succumbed in the' struggle for life. New forms of culture developed under the new organization ; agriculture attained the stage which it hardly has surpassed until now with the great number ; the domestic industries reached a high degree of perfection. The wilderness was conquered, it was intersected by roads, dotted with swarms thrown off by the mother-communities. Markets and fortified centres, as well as places of public worship, were erected. The conceptions of a wider union, extended to whole stems and to several stems of various origin, were slowly elaborated. The old conceptions of justice which were conceptions of mere revenge, slowly under- went a deep modification — the idea of amends for the wrong done taking the place of revenge. The cus- tomary law which still makes the law of the daily life for two-thirds or more of mankind, was elaborated under that organization, as well as a system of habits intended to prevent the oppression of the masses by the minorities whose powers grew in proportion to the growing facilities for private accumulation of wealth. This was the new form taken by the tendencies of

the masses for mutual support. And the progress- economical, intellectual, and moral — which mankind accomplished under this new popular form of organiz- ation, was so great that the States, when they were called later on into existence, simply took possession, i-n the interest of the minorities, of all the judicial, economical, and administrative functions which the village community already had exercised in the interest of all. Growth of authority in Barbarian Society. — Serfdom in the villages. — Revolt of fortified towns : their liberation ; their charts. — The guild. — Double origin of the free medieval city. — Self-jurisdic- tion, self-admbistration. — Honourable position of labour. — Trr-de by the guild and by the city.

^WjA^"Tj;^^^d need of mutual aid and support are such inherent paffs nt~f^S^ir^S?meuii3t_^t,no^me of history can we discover men hvino;' m smalHsoIatgd families, fip-htinf;- eachother for" tFe^eans of sub- sistence. _On the contrary, rhodern TesearcRT'^K-Tve saw it in the two preceding chapters, proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind ; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle — the village community — was called into existence by the

social genius of man. This institution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further develop their social institutions and to pass through some of the darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into loose aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step in their evolution, and to work out a number of secondary- social institutions, several of which have survived down to the present time. We have now to follow the further developments of the same ever-living tendency for mutual aid. Taking the village communities of the so-called barbarians at a time when they were making a new start of civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have to study the new aspects taken by the sociable wants of the masses in the middle ages, and especially in the mediaeval guilds and the mediaeval city.

Far from being the fighting animals they have often been compared to, the barbarians of the first centuries of our era (like so many Mongolians, Africans, Arabs, and so on, who still continue in the same barbarian stage) invariably preferred peace to war. With the exception of a few tribes which had been driven during the great migrations into unproductive deserts or highlands, and were thus compelled period- ically to prey upon their better-favoured neighbours — apart from these, the great bulk of the Teutons, the Saxons, the Celts, the Slavonians, and so on, very soon after they had settled in their newly-conquered abodes, reverted to the spade or to their ^herds. The earliest barbarian codes already represent to us societies composed of peaceful agricultural communi- ties, not hordes of men at war with each other. These barbarians covered the country with villages

and farmhouses ; ^ they cleared the forests, bridged the torrents, and colonized the formerly quite un- inhabited wilderness ; and they left the uncertain warlike pursuits to brotherhoods, sckolcs, or " trusts " of unruly men, gathered round temporary chieftains, who wandered about, offering their adventurous spirit, their arms, and their knowledge of warfare for the protection of populations, only too anxious to be left in peace. The warrior bands came and went, prosecuting their family feuds ; but the great mass continued to till the soil, taking but little notice of their would-be rulers, so long as they did not interfere with the independence of their village communitie.s.^ The new occupiers of Europe evolved the systems of land tenure and soil culture which are still in force with hundreds of millions of men ; they worked out their systems of compensation for wrongs, instead of the old tribal blood-revenge ; they learned the first rudiments of industry ; and while they fortified their villages with palisaded walls, or erected towers and earthen forts whereto to repair in case of a new invasion, they soon abandoned the task of defending these towers and forts to those who made of war a speciality.

1 W. Arnold, in his Wanderungen und Ansiedelungen der deutschen Stdmme, p. 431, even maintains that one-half of the now arable area in middle Germany must have been reclaimed from the sixth to the ninth century. Nitzsch {Geschuhte des deutschen Volkes, Leipzig, 1883, vol. i.) shares the same opinion. the armed brotherhoods offered them more facilities for enrichment than the tillers of the soil could find in their agricultural communities. Even now we see that armed men occasionally come together to shoot down Matabeles and to rob them of their droves of cattle, though the Matabeles only want peace and are ready to buy it at a high price. The scholes of old certainly were not more scrupulous than the scholes of our own time^ Droves of cattle, iron (which was extremely costly at that time^), and slaves were appropriated in this way ; and although most acquisi- tions were wasted on the spot in those glorious feasts of which epic poetry has so much to say — still some part of the robbed riches was used for further enrich- ment. There was plenty of waste land, and no lack of men ready to till it, if only they could obtain the necessary cattle and implements. - Whole villages, ruined by murrains, pests, fires, or raids of new immigrants, were often abandoned by their inhabitants, who went anywhere in search of new abodes. They still do so in Russia in similar circumstances. And if one of the hirdmen of the armed brotherhoods offered the peasants some cattle for a fresh start, some iron to make a plough, if not the plough itself, his protection from further raids, and a number of years free from all obligations, before they should begin to repay the contracted debt, they settled upon the land. And when, after a hard fight with bad crops, inundations

^ The composition for the stealing of a simple knife was 1 5 solidi, and of the iron parts of a mill, 45 solidi. (See on this subject Lamprecht's Wirthschaft und Recht der Franken in Raumer's Historisches Taschenbuch, 1883, p. 52.) According to the Riparian law, the sword, the spear, and the iron armour of a warrior attained the value of at least twenty-five cows, or two years of a freeman's labour. A cuirass alone was valued in the Salic law (Desmichels, quoted by Michelet) at as much as thirty-six bushels of wheat.

and pestilences, those pioneers began to repay their debts, they fell into servile obligations towards the protector of the territory. Wealth undoubtedly did accumulate in this way, and power always follows Vwealth.^ And yet, the more we penetrate into the life of those times, the sixth and seventh centuries of our era, the more we see that another element, besides wealth and military force, was required to constitute the authority of the few. It was an element of law and right, a desire of the masses to maintain peace, and to establish what they considered to be justice, which gave to the chieftains of the scholce — kings, dukes, knyazes, and the like — the force they acquired two or three hundred years later. That same idea of justice, conceived as an adequate revenge for the wrong done, which had grown in the tribal stage, now passed as a red thread through the history of subsequent institutions, and, much more even than military or economic causes, it became the basis upon which the authority of the kings and the feudal lords was founded.

In fact, one of the chief preoccupations of the barbarian village community always was, as it still is with our barbarian contemporaries, to put a speedy end to the feuds which arose from the then current conception of justice. When a quarrel took place, the community at once interfered, and after the folkmote 1 The chief wealth of the chieftains, for a long time, was in their personal domains peopled partly with prisoner slaves, but chiefly in the above way. On the origin of property see Inama Sternegg's Die Ausbildung der grossen Grundherrschaften in Deutschland, in Schmoller's Forschungen, Bd. I., 1878 j F. Dahn's Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Volker, Berhn, i88r ; Maurer's Dorfverfassung ; Guizot's Essais sur Vhistoire de France ; Maine's Village Community ; Botta's Histoire d' Italic ; Seebohm, Vinogradov, J. R. Green, etc.

had heard the case, it settled the amount of 'composi- tion {wergeld) to be paid to the wronged person, or to his family, as well as the fred, or fine for breach of peace, which had to be paid to the community. Interior quarrels were easily appeased in this way. But when feuds broke out between two different tribes, or two confederations of tribes, notwithstanding all measures taken to prevent them,^ the difficulty was to find an arbiter or sentence-finder whose decision should be accepted by both parties alike, both for his impartiality and for his knowledge of the oldest law. The difficulty was the greater as the customary laws of different tribes and confederations were at variance as to the compensation due in different cases. It there- fore became habitual to take the sentence-finder from among such families, or such tribes, as were reputed for keeping the law of old in its purity ; of being versed in the songs, triads, sagas, etc., by means of which law was perpetuated in memory ; and to retain law in this way became a sort of art, a " mystery," carefully transmitted in certain families from genera- tion to generation. Thus in Iceland, and in other Scandinavian lands, at every Allthing, or national folkmote, a Idvs'dgmathr used to recite the whole law from memory for the enlightening of the assembly; and in Ireland there was, as is known, a special class of men reputed for the knowledge of the old traditions, and therefore enjoying a great authority as judges.^ Again, when we are told by the Russian annals that some stems of North- West Russia, moved by the

2 Ancient Laws of Ireland, Introduction ; E. Nys, Etudes de drqit international, t. i., 1896, pp. 86 seq. Among the Ossetes the arbiters from three oldest villages enjoy a special reputation (M. Kovalevsky's Modern Custom and Old Law, Moscow, 1886, ii. 217, Russian). growing disorder which resulted from " clans rising against clans," appealed to Norman vai'ingiar to be their judges and commanders of vfaxnor sc holes ; and when we see the knyazes, or dukes, elected for the next two hundred years always from the same Norman family, we cannot but recognize that the Slavonians trusted to the Normans for a better knowledge of the law which would be equally recognized as good by different Slavonian kins. In this case the possession of runes, used for the transmission of old customs, was a decided advantage in favour of the Normans ; but in other cases there are faint indications that the "eldest" branch of the stem, the supposed mother- branch, was appealed to to supply the judges, and its decisions were relied upon as just ; ^ while at a later epoch we see a distinct tendency towards taking the sentence-finders from the Christian clergy, which, at that time, kept still to the fundamental, now forgotten, principle of Christianity, that retaliation is no act of justice. At that time the Christian clergy opened the churches as places of asylum for those who fled from blood revenge, and they willingly acted as arbiters in criminal cases, always opposing the old tribal principle of life for life and wound for wound. In short, the deeper we penetrate into the history of early institu- tions, the less we find grounds for the military theory of origin of authority. Even that power which later on became such a source of oppression seems, on the

1 It is permissible to think that this conception (related to the conception of tanistry) played an important part in the life of the period ; but research has not yet been directed that way. to half the compensation, went to the folkmote, and from times immemorial it used to be applied to works of common utility and defence. It has still the same destination (the erection of towers) among the Kabyles and certain Mongolian stems ; and we have direct evidence that even several centuries later the judicial fines, in Pskov and several French and German cities, continued to be used for the repair of the city walls. ^ It was thus quite natural that the fines should be handed over to the sentence-finder, who was bound, in return, both to maintain the schola of armed men to whom the defence of the territory was trusted, and to execute the sentences. This became a universal custom in the eighth and ninth centuries, even when the sentence-finder was an elected bishop. The germ of a combination of what we should now call the judicial power and the executive thus made its appear- ance. But to these two functions the attributions of the duke or king were strictly limited. He was no ruler of the people — the supreme power still belonging to the folkmote — not even a commander of the popular militia ; when the folk took to arms, it marched under a separate, also elected, commander, who was not a subordinate, but an equal to the king.^ The king was a lord on his personal domain only. In fact, in barbarian language, the word konung, koning, or cyning, synonymous with the Latin rex, had no other meaning than that of a temporary leader or chieftain

1 It was distinctly stated in the charter of St. Quentin of the year 1002 that the ransom for houses which had to be demolished for crimes went for the city walls. The same destination was given to the Ungeld in German cities. At Pskov the cathedral was the bank for the fines, and from this fund money was taken for the walls. 2 Sohm, Frdnkische Rechts- und Gerichtsverfassung, p. 23 ; also Nitzsch, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 78. of a band of men. The commander of a flotilla of boats, or even of a single pirate boat, was also a konung, and till the present day the commander of fishing in Norway is xi-3sne.6. Not-kong — "the king of the nets." ^ The veneration attached later on to the personality of a king did not yet exist, and while treason to the kin was punished by death, the slaying of a king could be recouped by the payment of compensation : a king simply was valued so much more than a freeman.^ And when King Knu (or Canute) had killed one man of his own schola, the saga represents him convoking his comrades to a thing where he stood on his knees imploring pardon. He was pardoned, but not till he had agreed to pay nine times the regular composition, of which one-third went to himself for the loss of one of his men, one- third to the relatives of the slain man, and one-third (the fred) to the schola^ In reality, a complete change had to be accomplished in the current concep- tions, under the double influence of the Church and the students of Roman law, before an idea of sanctity began to be attached to the personality of the king. However, it lies beyond the scope of these essays

1 See the excellent remarks on this subject in Augustin Thierry's Lettres surPhistoire de France, 7th letter. The barbarian translations of parts of the Bible are extremely instructive on this point. 2 Thirty-six times more than a noble, according to the Anglo- Saxon law. In the code of Rothari the slaying of a king is, however, punished by death ; but (apart from Roman influence) this new disposition was introduced (in 646) in the Lombardian law — as remarked by Leo and Botta — to cover the king from blood revenge. The king being at that time the executioner of his own sentences (as the tribe formerly was of its own sentences), he had to be protected by a special disposition, the more so as several Lombardian kings before Rothari -had been slain in succession (Leo and Botta, /. c, i.

^ Kaufmann, Deutsche Geschichte, Bd. I. " Die Germanen der Urzeit," p. 133. to follow the gradual development of authority out of the elements just indicated. Historians, such as Mr, and Mrs. Green for this country, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and Luchaire for France, Kaufmann, Janssen, W, Arnold, and even Nitzsch, for Germany, Leo and Botta for Italy, Byelaeff, Kostomarofif, and their followers for Russia, and many others, have fully told that tale. They have shown how populations, once free, and simply agreeing " to feed " a certain portion of their military defenders, gradually became the serfs of these protectors ; how " commendation " to the Church, or to a lord, became a hard necessity for the freeman ; how each lord's and bishop's castle became a robber's nest — how feudalism was imposed, in a word — and how the crusades, by freeing the serfs who wore the cross, gave the first impulse to popular emancipation. All this need not be retold in this place, our chief aim being to follow the constructive genius of the masses in their mutual-aid institutions.

At a time when the last vestiges of barbarian freedom seemed to disappear, and Europe, fallen under the dominion of thousands of petty rulers, was marching towards the constitution of such theocracies and despotic States as had followed the barbarian stage during the previous starts of civilization, or of barbarian monarchies, such as we see now in Africa, life in Europe took another direction. It went on on lines similar to those it had once taken in the cities of antique Greece. With a unanimity which seems almost incomprehensible, and for a long time was not understood by historians, the urban agglomerations, down to the smallest burgs, began to shake off the yoke of their worldly and clerical lords. The fortified

village rose against the lord's castle, defied it first, attacked it next, and finally destroyed it. The move- ment spread from spot to spot, involving every town on the surface of Europe, and in less than a hundred years free cities had been called into existence on the coasts of the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean, down to the fjords of Scandinavia ; at the feet of the Apennines, the Alps, the Black Forest, the Grampians, and the Carpathians ; in the plains of Russia, Hungary, France and Spain. Every- where the same revolt took place, with the same features, passing through the same phases, leading to the same results. Wherever men had found, or expected to find, some protection behind their town walls, they instituted their " co-jurations," their " fra- ternities," their " friendships," united in one common idea, and boldly marching towards a new life of mutual support and liberty. And they succeeded so well that in three or four hundred years they had changed the very face of Europe. They had covered the country with beautiful sumptuous buildings, ex- pressing the genius of free unions of free men, unrivalled since for their beauty and expressiveness ; and they bequeathed to the following generations all the arts, all the industries, of which our present civilization, with all its achievements and promises for the future, is only a further development. And when we now look to the forces which have produced these grand results, we find them — not in the genius of individual heroes, not in the mighty organization of- huge States or the political capacities of their rulers, but in ther very same current of mutual aid and support which we saw at work in the village community, and which was vivified and reinforced in the Middle Ages

by a new form of unions, inspired by the very same spirit but shaped on a new model — the guilds. It is well known by this time that feudalism did not imply a dissolution of the village community. Although the lord had succeeded in imposing servile labour upon the peasants, and had appropriated for himself such rights as were formerly vested in the village community alone (taxes, mortmain, duties on inheritances and marriages), the peasants had, never- theless, maintained the two fundamental rights of their communities : the common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction. In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants received him with flowers in one hand and arms in the other, and asked him — which law he intended to apply : the one he found in the village, or the one he brought with him .■* And, in the first case, they handed him the flowers and accepted him ; while in the second case they fought him.^ Now, they accepted the king's or the lord's official whom they could not refuse ; but they main- tained the folkmote's jurisdiction, and themselves nominated six, seven, or twelve judges, who acted with the lord's judge, in the presence of the folkmote, as arbiters and sentence-finders. In most cases the official had nothing left to him but to confirm the sentence and to levy the customary fred. This precious right of self-jurisdiction, which, at that time, meant self-administration and self-legislation, had been maintained through all the struggles ; and even the lawyers by whom Karl the Great was surrounded could not abolish it ; they were bound to confirm it. At the same time, in all matters concerning the com-

1 Dr. F. Dahn, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Volker, Berlin, 1881, Bd. I. 96. munity's domain, the folkmote retained its supremacy and (as shown by Maurer) often claimed submission from the lord himself in land tenure matters. No growth of feudalism could break this resistance ; the village community kept its ground ; and when, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the invasions of the Normans, the Arabs, and the Ugrians had demon- strated that military scholcB were of little value for protecting the land, a general movement began all over Europe for fortifying the villages with stone walls and citadels. Thousands of fortified centres were then built by the energies of the village com- munities ; and, once they had built their walls, once a common interest had been created in this new sanctuary — the town walls — they soon understood that they could henceforward resist the encroachments of the inner enemies, the lords, as well as the invasions of foreigners. A new life of freedom began to develop within the fortified enclosures. The mediaeval city was born.^

^ If I thus follow the views long since advocated by Maurer (Geschichte der Stddteverfassung in Deutschland, Erlangen, 1869), it is because he has fully proved the uninterrupted evolution from the village community to the mediaeval city, and that his views alone can explain the universality of the communal movement. Savigny and Eichhorn and their followers have certainly proved that the traditions of the Roman munidpia had never totally disappeared. But they took no account of the village-community period which the barbarians lived through before they had any cities. The fact is, that whenever mankind made a new start in civilization, in Greece, Rome, or middle Europe, it passed through the same stages — the tribe, the village community, the free city, the state — each one naturally evolving out of the preceding stage. Of course, the experience of each preceding civilization was never lost. Greece (itself influenced by Eastern civilizations) influenced Rome, and Rome influenced our civilization ; but each of them began from the same beginning — the tribe. And just as we cannot say that our states are continuations of the Roman state, so also can we not say that the mediaeval cities of Europe (including Scandinavia and

No period of history could better illustrate the constructive powers of the popular masses than the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the fortified villages and market-places, representing so many " oases amidst the feudal forest," began to free them- selves from their lord's yoke, and slowly elaborated the future city organization ; but, unhappily, this is a period about which historical information is especially scarce : we know the results, but little has reached us about the means by which they were achieved. Under the protection of their walls the cities' folkmotes — either quite independent, or led by the chief noble or merchant families — conquered and maintained the right of electing the military defensoi* and supreme judge of the town, or at least of choosing between those who pretended to occupy this position. In Italy the young communes were continually sending away their defensors or domini, fighting those who refused . to go. The same went on in the East. In Bohemia, rich and poor alike [Bohemiccs gentis magni et parvi, nobiles et ignobiles) took part in the election ; ^ while the vyeches (folkmotes) of the Russian cities regularly elected their dukes — always from the same Rurik family — covenanted with them, and sent the knyaz away if he had provoked discontent.^ At the same