NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE

TRENT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

THE

Evolution of Property

FROM

Savagery to Civilization

By PAUL LAFARGUE

CHICAGO

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY CO-OPERATIVE

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“The economic structure of society is the real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is raised, and to which definite social forms of thought correspond : in short, the mode of produc¬ tion determines the character of the social, political, and intellectual life generally.”

Kabl Marx, Capital.

“A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind.”

Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society.

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CONTENTS

Chapteb Page

I. Forms of Contemporaneous Property. 7

II. Primitive Communism . 20

III. Family or Consanguine Collectivism. 45

IV. Feudal Property . 75

V. Bourgeois Property . 126

THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY

CHAPTER I

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

Political economists have laid it down as an axiom that Capital, the form of property at pres¬ ent predominant, is eternal; they have tasked their brains to show that capital is coeval with the world, and that as it has had no beginning, so it can have no end.* In proof of which astound¬ ing assertion all the manuals of political economy repeat with much complacency the story of the savage who, having in his possession a couple of bows, lends one of them to a brother savage, for a share in the produce of his chase.

So great were the zeal and ardor which econo¬ mists brought to bear on their search for capital¬ istic property in prehistoric times, that they suc¬ ceeded, in the course of their investigations, in discovering the existence of property outside the human species, to wit, among the invertebrates : for the ant, in her foresight, is a hoarder of pro¬ visions. It is a pity that they should not have gone a step farther, and affirmed that, if the ant lays up stores, she does so with a view to sell the

•By capital is meant anything which produces interest: a snm of money lent, which at the end of months, or years, yields a profit; land that is cultivated, or any instrument of labor that is set in action not by its proprietor, but by salaried workmen ; but the land which is cultivated by the peasant and his family, the gun of the poacher, the plane or hammer of the carpenter, albeit property, is not capitalistic property, because the owner utilizes it himself in¬ stead of using it to extract surplus value from others. The notion of profit without labor sticks like a Nessus-shirt to the term capital.

8 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

same and realize a profit by the circulation of her capital.

But there is a gap in the economists’ theory of the eternity of capital. They have omitted to show that the term capital likewise exists from all time. In a ship every rope has its appropriate name, with the exception of the bell rope. It is inadmissible that in the domain of political economy the terminology should have been so in¬ adequate as not to furnish a name for so useful and all-important a thing as capital ; yet it is a matter of fact that the term capital, in the modern sense, dates no farther back than the 18th century. This is the case also with the word philanthropy (the humanitarian hypocrisy proper to the capital¬ istic regime). And it was in the 18th century that capitalist property began to assert itself, and to acquire a preponderating influence in society. This social predominance of capital led to the French Revolution, which, although one of the most considerable events of modern history, was, after all, but a bourgeois revolution accomplished with those catchwords of liberty, fraternity, equality, justice and patriotism which the bour¬ geois were, later on, to employ in puffing their political and financial enterprises. At the time of the Revolution the capitalists were cattle so newly raised by society that in his “Dictionaire de Mots Nouveaux,” published in 1802, Sebastien Mercier thought it necessary to insert the word capitaliste, and to append the following curious definition : — “Capitaliste: this word is well nigh unknown out of Paris. It designates a monster of wealth, a man who has a heart of iron, and no

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 9

affections save metallic ones. Talk to him of the land tax — and he laughs at you ; he does not own an inch of land, how should you tax him? Like the Arabs of the desert who have plundered a caravan, and who bury their gold out of fear of other brigands, the capitalists have hidden away our money.”

In 1802 mankind had not as yet acquired the feeling of profound respect which in our day is inspired by the capitalist.

The term capital, though of Latin origin, has no equivalent in the Greek and Latin tongues. The non-existence of the word in two such rich languages affords a proof that capitalist property did not exist in ancient times, at least as an eco¬ nomical and social phenomenon.

The form of property which corresponds to the term capital was developed and acquired social importance only after the establishment of com¬ mercial production, which crowned the econom¬ ical and political movement agitating Europe after the 12th century. This commercial production was stimulated by the discovery of America and the route to India by the Cape of Good Hope, by the importation of precious metals from America, the taking of Constantinople, the invention of printing, the family alliances among the sover¬ eigns of Europe, and the organization of the great feudal states, with the relative and general pacification which resulted therefrom. All these and other collateral causes co-operated to create a rapid development of capital, the most perfect of all forms of private property, and, it may be averred, the last. The comparatively recent ap-

10 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

pearance of capital is the best proof adducible that property is not immutable and always the same, but that, on the contrary, it, like all material and intellectual phenomena, incessantly evolves and passes through a series of forms which differ, but are derived, from one another.

So far indeed is property from being always identical that in our own society it affects divers forms, capable of being reduced to two principal

'a. Common property of ancient origin , the type of which are the communal lands, exposed for centuries past to the en¬ croachments of the nobility and bourgeoisie.

" b. Common property of modern origin, administered by the State, comprised under the term Public Services, (the Mint, Post Office, Public Roads, National Libraries, Mu- ^ seums, etc.)

{a. Property of personal appro¬ priation.

b. Property. — Instruments of labor.

c. Property. — Capital.

(a.) Property of personal appropriation be¬ gins with the food one eats, and extends to the articles of clothing and objects of luxury (rings, jewels, etc.), with which one covers and decks oneself. Time was when the house, too, was in¬ cluded in this branch of personal property ; a man possessed his dwelling, a marble palace or a hut of straw, like the tortoise his shell. If by the application of machinery to industry, civilization

I. Forms of Common Property.

II. Forms of Private Property.

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 11

has placed numberless objects of luxury within the reach of the poor which hitherto have been purchasable by the rich alone, it has on the other hand deprived the bulk of the nation of their dwelling-house. It constrains them to live in hired apartments and furnished lodgings ; and in the midst of unprecedented wealth it has reduced the producer to a strict minimum of property of personal appropriation.

Capitalist civilization condemns the proletarian to vegetate in conditions of existence inferior to those of the savage. To waive the important fact that the savage does not labor for others, and to confine ourselves wholly to the question of food, it is indisputable that the barbarians who invaded and peopled Europe, and who, possess¬ ing as they did, herds of swine and other ani¬ mals, and having within their reach all the re¬ sources of the chase in richly stocked forests, and of fishing in the seas and rivers — if ill-clad with the skins of wild beasts and coarsely-woven materials — partook of more animal food than do our proletarians, whose shoddy clothing, excel¬ lently woven by perfected machinery, is a very poor protection against the inclemencies of the weather. The condition of the proletarian is the harder in that his constitution is less robust and less inured to the rigor of the climate than was the body of the savage. The following fact af¬ fords an idea of the robustness of uncivilized man. In the prehistoric tombs of Europe skulls have been discovered bearing traces of perfora¬ tions suggestive of trepanning. Anthropologists at first took these skulls for amulets or orna-

12 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

ments, and concluded that they had been per¬ forated after death, until Broca showed that the operation could not have been performed on corpses by producing a number of skulls in which a process of cicatrisation was observable, that could not have taken place unless the trepanned person had survived the operation. It was ob¬ jected that it must have been impossible for ignorant savages, with their rude instruments of bronze and silex, to practice so delicate an opera¬ tion, considered dangerous by modern doctors, despite their learning and the excellence of their surgical instruments. But all doubts have been now removed by the positive knowledge that this kind of operation is practiced by savages with perfect success. Among the Berbers of the pres¬ ent day the operation is performed in the open air, and after the lapse of a few days, to the infinite astonishment of European witnesses, the tre¬ panned man is on his legs again and resumes his occupations just as if a portion of his skull had not been scraped away, for the operation is per¬ formed by scraping. Skull wounds, which entail such grave complications in civilized persons, heal with extraordinary quickness and ease in primitive peoples. Notwithstanding the frantic enthusiasm with which civilization inspires the philistine, the physical, and maybe the mental, inferiority of the civilized man, allowing, of course, for exceptions, must be conceded. It will require an education beginning at the cradle and prolonged throughout life and continued for several generations to restore to the human being of future society the vigor and perfection of the

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 13

senses which characterise the savage and the barbarian.* Morgan, one of the rare anthropolo¬ gists who do not share the imbecile disdain pro¬ fessed for the savage and the barbarian by the philistine, was also the first to classify in logical order the abundant and often contradictory ma¬ terials that have accumulated respecting savage races, and to trace the first outlines of the evolu¬ tion of prehistoric man. He observes, “It may be suggested as not improbable of ultimate recognition that the progress of mankind in the period of savagery, in its relation to the sum of human progress, was greater in degree than in the three sub-periods of barbarism, and that the progress made in the whole period of barbarism was, in like manner, greater in degree than it has been since the entire period of civilization.”! The savage or barbarian transplanted into civil¬ ized society cuts a sorry figure : he loses his na¬ tive good qualities, while he contracts the dis¬ eases and acquires the vices of civilized man; but the history of the Greeks and the Egyptians shows us how marvelous a degree of material and intellectual development a barbarous people is capable of attaining when placed in the requi¬ site conditions and evolving freely.

•Cffisar, to whom the panegyrists ot our society allow certain powers of observation, never wearied of admiring the strength and skill In bodily exercises of the German barbarians whom he was forced to combat. So great was his admiration for them, that in order to overcome the heroic resistance of the Gauls, commanded by Vercingetorix, he sent across the Rhine into Germany for cavalry and light-armed infantry, who were used to engage among them; and as they were mounted on bad horses he took those of the mili¬ tary tribunes, the knights and veterans, and distributed them among the Germans, — “De Bello Galileo, ” vii. 65.

f Lewis Morgan. "Ancient Society,” Part 1, chap. III. "Ratio of Human Progress.”

14 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

The civilized producer is reduced to the mini¬ mum of personal property necessary for the satisfaction of his most urgent wants merely be¬ cause the capitalist possesses means and to spare for the indulgence of his most extravagant fancies. The capitalist should have a hundred heads and a hundred feet, like the Hecatonchiri of Greek mythology, if he would utilize the hats and boots that encumber his wardrobe. If the proletarians suffer from the want of personal property, the capitalists end by becoming the martyrs of a superfluity thereof. The ennui which oppresses them, and the maladies which prey on them, deteriorating and undermining the race, are the consequences of an excess of the means of enjoyment.

( b .) Private property in the instruments of labor.

Man, according to Franklin’s definition, is a tool-making animal. It is the manufacture of tools which distinguishes man from the brutes, his ancestors. Monkeys make use of sticks and stones, man is the only animal that has wrought silex for the manufacture of arms and tools, so that the discovery of a stone implement in a cavern or geological stratum is proof as positive of the presence of a human being as the human skeleton itself. The instrument of labor, the silex knife of the savage, the plane of the car¬ penter, the bistouri of the surgeon, the microscope of the physiologist, or the plough of the peasant, is an addition to man’s organs which facilitates the satisfaction of his wants.

So long as petty manual industry prevails, the

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 15

free producer is the proprietor of his instruments of labor. In the middle ages the journeyman traveled with his bag of tools, which never left him ; the yeoman, even before the constitution of private property, temporarily possessed the patch of land which was allotted to him in the terri¬ torial partition ; the mediaeval serf was so closely connected with the soil he cultivated as to be in¬ separable therefrom.

There remain many vestiges of this private property in the instruments of labor, but they are fast disappearing. In all the industries which have been seized on by machinery, the individual implement has been torn out of the worker’s hand and replaced by the machine tool — a collect¬ ive instrument of labor which can no longer be the property of the producer. Capitalism divests man of his personal property, the tool ; and the first perfect instruments he had manufactured for himself, his weapons of defense, were the first to be wrested from him. The savage is the pro¬ prietor of his bow and arrows, which constitute at one and the same time his arms and his tools, historically the most perfected. The soldier was the first proletarian who was stripped of his tools, i. e., his arms, which belong to the govern¬ ment that enrolls him.

Capitalistic society has reduced to a minimum the personal property of the proletarian. It was impossible to go further without causing the death of the producer — the capitalists’ goose that lays the golden eggs. It tends to dispossess him altogether of his instruments of labor, a spolia¬ tion which is already an accomplished fact for the great bulk of workers.

16 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY (c) Property Capital.

The capital form of property is the truly typical form of property in modern society. In no other society has it existed as a universal or dominant fact.

The essential condition of this form of property is the exploitation of the free producer, who is robbed hourly of a fraction of the value he cre¬ ates ; a fact which Marx has demonstrated beyond refutation. Capital is based on the production of commodities, on a form of production, that is, in which a man produces in view, not of the con¬ sumption of the laborer, or of that of his feudal lord or slave-owning master, but in view of the market. In other societies, also, men bought and sold, but it was the surplus articles alone that were exchanged. In those societies the laborer, slave, or serf, was exploited, it is true, but the proprietor had at least certain obligations towards him ; e. g., the slaveholder was bound to feed his human beast of burden whether he worked or not. The capitalist has been released from all charges, which now rest upon the free laborer. It roused the indignation of the good natured Plutarch that Cato, the sour moralist, rid himself of slaves grown old and decrepit in his service. What would he have said of the modern capitalist, who allows the workers that have enriched him to starve or to die in the workhouse? In emancipating the slave and bond- man, it was not the liberty of the producer that the capitalist sought to compass but the liberty of capital, which had to be discharged of all obligations towards the workmen. It is only

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 17

when the capital form of property is in force that the proprietor can exercise in all its stringency the right to use and abuse.

These are the extant forms of property in modern society. Even a superficial view thereof will convince us that these forms are themselves undergoing change ; e. g., while communal prop¬ erty of ancient origin is being converted into private property, private capitalistic property is being turned into common property administered by the State ; but before attaining this ultimate form, capital dispossesses the producer of his individual tool and creates the collective instru¬ ment of labor.

Now having convinced ourselves that the ex¬ istent forms of property are in a state of flux and evolution, we must be blind indeed if we refuse to admit that in the past also property was un¬ stable, and that it has passed through different phases before arriving at the actual forms, which must, in their turn, resolve themselves and be replaced by other novel forms.

******

In this essay I propose to treat of the various forms of property anterior to its assumption of the capital form. Before entering on my subject [ would premise a few particulars touching the method employed by me in this attempt at a partial reconstruction of history.

All men, without distinction of race or color, from the cradle to the grave, pass through the same phases of development. They experience

18 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

at ages, which vary within narrow limits, accord¬ ing to race, climate, and conditions of existence, the same crises of growth, maturity, and decay. In like manner human societies traverse analo¬ gous social, religious, and political forms, with the ideas which correspond thereto. To Vico, who has been styled “the father of the philosophy of history,” is due the honor of having been the first to apprehend the great law of historical develop¬ ment.

In his “Scienza Nuova” he speaks of “an ideal, eternal history, in accordance with which are suc¬ cessively developed the histories of all nations, from what state soever of savagery, ferocity, or barbarism men progress towards domestication.”*

If we could ascertain the history of a people from the state of savagery to that of civilization, we should have the typical history of each of the peoples that have inhabited the globe. It is out of our power to reconstruct that history, for it is impossible for us to reascend the successive stages travelled by a people in their course of progress. But if we cannot cut out this history, all of a piece, of the life of a nation or a race, we can, at any rate, reconstruct it by piecing to¬ gether the scattered data which we possess re¬ specting the different peoples of the globe. It is in this wise that humanity, as it grows older, learns to decipher the story of its infancy.

The manners and usages of the forefathers of

*TJna etoria ideal, eterna, sopra la quale corrono In tempo le atorle dl tuttl le nazioni : ch’ovumque da tempi selyaggi, ferooi e fieri comminciamo gli uominl ad addimestlearsi. (G. Vico, Principi di Scienza Nuova. De’ Prlncipi Libero secondo, Section V. ed. dl Ferrari. Milano, 1837.)

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 19

civilized nations survive in those of the savage peoples whom civilization has not wholly exter¬ minated. The investigations of the customs, social and political institutions, religious and mental conceptions of barbarians, made by men of learning and research in both hemispheres, enable u's to evoke a past which we had come to consider as irrecoverably lost. Among savage peoples, we can detect the beginnings of prop¬ erty: by gleaning facts in all parts of the globe, and by co-ordinating them into a logical series, we may succeed in following the different phases of the evolution of property.

CHAPTER II

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

I

If political economists so confidently refer capital to the childhood of humanity, it is because they indulge themselves in a convenient ignorance of the customs of primitive peoples.*

There are savages at present in existence who have no conception of landed property, whether private or collective, and who have barely ar¬ rived at a notion of individual ownership of the objects which they personally appropriate. Cer¬ tain Australians possess, for all personal property, the objects attached to their persons, such as arms, ornaments inserted in their ears, lips, and noses ; or skins of beasts for clothing ; human fat, wherewith to cure their rheumatism ; stones laid up in baskets, woven of bark, fastened to the body of the owner. Personally appropriated by them, so to say incorporated with them, these objects are not taken away from them at their death, but are burned or buried with their

•In his recent and notorious discussion with Mr. Herbert Spencer, the learned Professor Huxley, who acts as a champion of capital, and who calls Rousseau an ignoramus, has given a remarkable proof of his ignorance of the customs of savages which he discusses with such assurance. “The confident assertions,” wrote the learned pro¬ fessor in the Nineteenth Century of January, 1890, “that the land was originally held in common by the whole nation are singularly ill-founded." “Land was held as private or several property, and not as the property of the public or general body of the nation."

20

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

21

corpses. Names are among the primary indi¬ vidual property we meet with. The savage never reveals his name to a stranger; it is a precious thing of which he will make a present to a friend : so completely is his name identified with his person, that after his death his tribe ceases to pronounce it. For an object to become individual property, it must be really or fictitiously incor¬ porated with the person of the proprietor : when the savage desires to intimate that an object be¬ longs to him, he will simulate the appropriation of it by licking it with his tongue ; the Esquimaux after buying any article, if but a needle, imme¬ diately applies it to his mouth, or he will con¬ secrate the object by a symbolical act, significa¬ tive of his intention to keep the same for his personal use: this is the origin of taboo.

Manufactured articles are, in like manner, owned only if they have been appropriated ; thus, an Esquimaux cannot possess more than two canoes ; the third is at the disposal of the clan : whatsoever the proprietor does not use is con¬ sidered as property without an owner. A savage never holds himself responsible for the loss of a canoe or any other borowed implement for hunt¬ ing or fishing, and never dreams of restoring it.

If the savage is incapable of conceiving the idea of individual posession of objects not in¬ corporated with his person, it is because he has no conception of his individuality as distinct from the consanguine group in which he lives. The savage is environed by such perpetual material danger, and compassed round with such constant imaginary terrors that he cannot exist in a state

22

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

of isolation ; he cannot even form a notion of the possibility of such a thing. To expel a savage from his clan, his horde, is tantamount to con¬ demning him to death ; among the prehistoric Greeks, as among all barbarians, a murder in¬ tentional or by accident of one of the members of the clan was punished by exile. Orestes, after the assassination of his mother, was compelled to expatriate himself to appease the public indigna¬ tion ; in very advanced civilizations, like those of Greece and Italy in historic times, exile was con¬ sidered the worst of penalties. “The exile,” says the Greek poet Theognis, “has neither friends nor faithful comrades, the most doleful thing in exile.” To be divided from his companions, to live alone, seemed a fearful thing to primeval man, accustomed to live in troops.

Savages, even though individually completer beings, seeing that they are self-sufficing, than are civilized persons, are so thoroughly identified with their hordes and clans that their individ¬ uality does not make itself felt either in the family or in property.*

The clan was all in all ; the clan was the family ;

•In savage hordes there exists no private family, not even the matriarchal one. The children belong to the entire horde, and they call mother, indifferently their own mother, the sisters of their mother and the women of the same age as their mother. When, in process of time, the sexual relations, at first promiscuous, began to be restricted, prior to the appearance of the “pairing family,” there obtained the common marriage of the clan. All the women of one clan were the wives of the men of another clan, and, reciprocally, all the men of that clan were the joint husbands of the women ; when they met, it was only necessary for them to recognize each other in order to legitimate a conjugal union. This curious form of communist marriage has been observed in Australia by Messrs. Pison and Howitt. Traces of it are discoverable in the mythological legends of Greece.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

23

it was the clan that married ; it was the clan, again, that was the owner of property. In the clan all things are in common : the bushman of Africa who receives a present divides it among all the members of his horde ; when he has cap¬ tured an animal or found any object he shares his booty with his comrades, frequently reserving for himself the smallest portion. In times of famine, the young Fuegians explore the coast, and if they chance to light upon any Cetaceous animal (a favorite dainty) they hasten, before touching it, to inform their comrades of their find. These at once hurry to the spot; whereupon the oldest member of the party proceeds to portion out equal shares to all.

Hunting and fishing, those two primitive modes of production, are practiced jointly, and the prod¬ uce is shared, in common. According to Mar- tius, the Botocudos, those dauntless tribes of Brazil, organize their hunt in concert and never abandon the spot on which an animal has been captured until they have devoured it. The same fact is reported of the Dacotas and the Aus¬ tralians. Even among those tribes in which the chase in common is in abeyance, this ancient mode of consuming the prey holds good : the successful hunter invited to a feast all the mem¬ bers of his clan, of his village, and occasionally of his tribe, to partake of his chase : they are, so to say, national feasts. At Svarietie, in the Cau¬ casus, whenever a family slaughters an ox, a cow, or a dozen sheep, it is the occasion of a village feast; the villagers eat and drink together in memory of the relations that have died in the

24

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

course of the year. The feasts of the dead are reminiscences of these common repasts.

Morgan, who has so minutely studied the primitive communist manners, in his last and im¬ portant work* describes the methods of hunting and fishing practiced among the Redskins of North America : — “The tribes of the plain, who subsist almost exclusively upon animal food, show in their usages in hunt the same tendency to com¬ munism. The Blackfeet, during the buffalo hunt, follow the herd on horseback, in large parties, composed of men, women, and children.

When the active pursuit of the herd com¬ mences, the hunters leave the dead animal in the track of the chase, to be appropriated by the first persons who come up behind. This method of distribution is continued until all are supplied. . . . They cut up the beef into strings, and either dry it in the air or smoke it over a fire. Some make part of the capture into pemmican, which consists of dried and pulverized meat, mixed with melted buffalo fat, which is boiled in the hide of the animal. During the fishing season in the Colum¬ bia river, where fish is more abundant than in any other river on the earth, all the members of the tribe encamp together and make a common stock of the fish obtained. They are divided each day according to the number of women, giving to each an equal share. The fishes are split open, scarified and dried on scaffolds, after which they are packed in baskets and removed to the vil¬ lages.”

•Lewis H. Morgan, “Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines.” Washington, 1881.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

25

When the savage ceases to lead a nomadic ex¬ istence, and when he settles and builds himself a dwelling-house, the house is not a private but a common one, even after the family has begun to assume a matriarchal form. The communal houses resemble those that La Perouse discovered in Polynesia; they are 10 feet high, 110 feet in length, and 10 feet in width, having the shape of an inverted pirogue; the entrance was by doors situated at both extremities, and they afforded shelter for a clan of upwards of 100 persons. The long houses of the Iroquois, which, according to Morgan, disappeared before the commencement of the present century, were 100 feet long by 30 broad, and 20 feet in height ; they were traversed by a longitudinal passage having an opening at both ends; into this passage, like the alveoles of a hive, opened a series of small rooms, 7 feet in width, in which dwelt the married women of the clan. Each habitation bore the totem of the clan, i. e., the animal supposed to be its ancestor. The houses of the Dyaks of Borneo are similar, with the difference that they are raised from 15 to 20 feet from the ground on posts of hard timber; they recall the lake cities, built upon piles, dis¬ covered in the Swiss lakes. Herodotus says that the Paeonians dwelt in houses of this description in Lake Prasias (V., sec. 16). The casas grandes of the Redskins of Mexico presented the appear¬ ance of an enormous stairway, with superim¬ posed stories, subdivided into cells for the married people: not improbably it is in such like communist dwellings that the prehistoric Greeks lived, as may be inferred from the palace brought

26

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

to light in Argolis by the excavations of Dr. Schliemann. In these communist dwelling- houses the provisions are in common and the re¬ pasts are common.

We must turn to Morgan for a description of the life of the inhabitants of these communal houses. His researches were confined, it is true, to the American Redskins, and principally the Iroquois, amongst whom he had lived ; but as he says, “when any usage is found among the Iro¬ quois in a definite or positive form, it renders probable the existence of the same usage in other tribes in the same condition, because their neces¬ sities were the same.”

“The Iroquois who formed a household, culti¬ vated gardens, gathered harvest, and stored it in their dwellings as a common store. There was more or less of individual ownership of these products and of their possession by different families. For example, the corn, after stripping back the husk, was braided by the husk in bunches and hung up in the different apartments ; but when one family had exhausted its supply, their wants were supplied by other families so long as any remained ; each hunting or fishing party made a common stock of the capture, of which the surplus on their return was divided among the several families of each household, and, having been cured, were kept for winter use.” In these Indian villages we note the singular phenomenon of individual ownership combined with common usage. “There is nothing in the Indian house and family without its par¬ ticular owner,” remarks Heckewelder, in treating

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

27

of the Delawares and the Munsees; “every indi¬ vidual knows what belongs to him, from the horse or cow to the dog, cat, or kitten and little chicken. . . . For a litter of kittens or a

brood of chickens there are often as many owners as there are individual animals. In purchasing a hen with her brood one frequently has to deal for it with several children. Thus while the prin¬ ciple of community of goods prevails in the state, the nghts of property are acknowledged among the members of the family.”*

The Indians of Laguna village (New Mexico) had common stores. “Their women, generally, have the control of the granary,” wrote the Rev. Sam. Gorman to Morgan in 1869, “and they are more provident than their Spanish neighbors about the future ; they try to have a year’s pro¬ vision on hand. It is only when two years of scarcity succeed each other that Pueblos, as a community, suffer hunger.”

Among the Maya Indians food is prepared in a hut, and every family sends for a portion. Stephen saw a procession of women and children, each carrying an earthen bowl containing a quan¬ tity of smoking hot broth, all coming down the same road and disappearing among the different houses.t

But among the Iroquois each household pre¬ pared the food of its members. A matron made

•Heckewelder. — “History, Manners, and Customs of Indian Na¬ tions who once inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States." Reprinted in 1876. — Heckewelder lived as a missionary among the American Indians for fifteen years, from 1771 to 1786, and was conversant with their language.

tStephen. “Incidents of Travel In Yucatan,” II.

28

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

the division from the kettle to each family ac¬ cording to their needs ; it was served warm to each person in earthen or wooden bowls. They had neither tables, chairs, or plates, in our sense, nor any room in the nature of a kitchen or a dining-room, but ate each by himself, sitting or standing where was most convenient to the per¬ son, the men eating first and by themselves, and the women and children afterwards and by them¬ selves. That which remained was reserved for any member of the household when hungry. To¬ wards evening the women cooked hominy, the maize having been pounded into bits the size of a grain of rice, which was boiled and put aside to be used cold as a lunch in the morning and even¬ ing and for entertainment of visitors ; they had neither formal breakfast nor supper ; each person, when hungry, ate whatever food the house con¬ tained. They were moderate eaters. This, adds Morgan, is a fair picture of Indian life in general in America, when discovered.

Similar manners obtained in pre-historic Greece, and the syssities (common repasts) of historic times were but a reminiscence of the primitive communist repasts. Heraclides of Pon- tus, the disciple of Plato, has preserved for us a description of the communistic repasts of Creta, where the primitive manners prevailed during a long period of time. At the andreies (repasts of men) every adult citizen received an equal share, except the Archon, member of the council of the ancients ( geronia ), who received a fourfold por¬ tion — one in his quality of simple citizen, another in that of president of the table, and two addi-

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

29

tional portions for the care of the hall and furni¬ ture. All the tables were under the supervision of a matriarch, who distributed the food and os¬ tensibly set aside the choicest bits for the men who had distinguished themselves in the council or on the battlefield. Strangers were served first, even before the archon. A vessel with wine and water was handed round from guest to guest ; at the end of the repast it was replenished. Hera- clides mentions common repasts of the men only, but Hoeck assumes that in the Dorian cities there were also repasts of women and children. Our knowledge of the constant separation of the sexes among savages and barbarians renders probable the assumption of the learned historian of Creta. According to Aristotle the provisions for these repasts were furnished by the harvests, the flocks and herds, and the tributes of the serfs belonging to the community ; hence we may infer that men, women, and children, in Creta, were maintained at the expense of the state. He asserts that these repasts may be traced back to a very remote antiquity; that it was Minos who established them in Creta and Italus among the Oenotrians, whom he taught agriculture; and as Aristotle finds these common repasts still prevalent in Italy, he concludes that they originated there, ignoring the fact that they occur among all prim¬ itive peoples.*

Plutarch informs us that at these common re¬ pasts no one person was considered as superior to the other, wherefore he styles them aristocratic

•Aristotle. ‘•Politics,” ;hap ix., sections 2, 3, 4.

Book II., chap, iii., section 4. Book IV., French ed., B. St. HHaire, 1848.

30

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

assemblies ( sunedria aristokratika). The persons who sat down at the same table were probably members of the same family. In Sparta the members of a syssitia were formed into corre¬ sponding military divisions, and fought together. Savages and barbarians, accustomed at all times to act in common, in battle always range them¬ selves according to families, clans and tribes.

It was of such imperative necessity that every member of the clan should get his share of the aliments, that in the Greek language the word moira, which signifies the portion of a guest at a repast, came to signify Destiny, the supreme Goddess to whom men and gods are alike sub¬ mitted and who deals out to everyone his portion of existence, just as the matriarch of the Cretan syssitia apportions to each guest his share of food. It should be remarked that in Greek my¬ thology Destiny is personified by women — Moira, Aissa, and the Keres — and that their names signify the portion to which each person is en¬ titled in the division of victuals or spoils.

When the common dwelling house, sheltering an entire clan, came to be sub-divided into private houses, containing a single family, the repasts ceased to be held in common, save on occasions of religious and national solemnities, such as the Greek syssities, which were celebrated in order to preserve the memory of the past ; the provisions, although individually possessed by each private family, continue, practically, at the disposal of the members of the tribe. “Every man, woman, or child, in Indian communities,” says Catlin, “is allowed to enter anyone’s lodge, and even that of

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

31

the chief of the nation, and eat when they are hungry. Even so can the poorest and most worthless drone of the nation ; if he is too lazy to supply himself or to hunt, he can walk into any lodge, and everyone will share with him as long as there is anything to eat. He, however, who thus begs when he is able to hunt, pays dear for his meat, for he is stigmatized with the disgrace¬ ful epithet of poltroon or beggar.”

In the Caroline Isles, when an indigene sets out on a journey, he carries with him no provisions. When he is hungry he enters a lodge without any kind of ceremony, and without waiting for per¬ mission he plunges his hand into the tub contain¬ ing the popoi (a paste of the fruit of the bread tree) and when his hunger is satisfied he departs without so much as thanking anybody. He has (^utexercise3^aTigfiE\

"TTieie communistic habits, which had once been general, were maintained in Lacedaemonia long after the Spartans had issued out of barbarism ; private property in objects of personal appropria¬ tion was extremely vague and precarious. Plu¬ tarch says that Lycurgus, the mythical personage to whom the Spartans refer all their institutions, forbade the closing of the house doors in order that everybody might walk in and help himself to the food and utensils he wanted, even in the ab¬ sence of the owner: a citizen of Sparta was en¬ titled, without permission, to ride the horses, use the dogs, and even dispose of the slaves of any other Spartan.

Very gradually did the idea of private prop¬ erty, which is so ingrained in, and appears so

32

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

natural to, the philistine, dawn upon the human mind. The earliest reflections of man, on the con¬ trary, led him to think that all things should be common to all. “The Indians,” says Hecke- welder, “think that the Great Spirit has made the earth, and all that it contains, for the common good of mankind ; when he stocked the country and gave them plenty of game, it was not for the good of a few, but of all. Everything is given in common to the sons of men. Whatever liveth on the land, whatever groweth out of the earth, and all that is in the rivers and waters, was given jointly to all, and every one is entitled to his share. Hospitality with them is not a virtue,

but a strict duty . They would lie

down on an empty stomach rather than have it laid to their charge that they had neglected their duty by not satisfying the wants of the stranger,

the sick, or the needy . because

they have a common right to be helped out of the common stock ; for if the meat they have been served with was taken from the wood, it was common to all before the hunter took it ; if corn and vegetables, it had grown out of the common ground, yet not by the power of man, but by that of the Great Spirit.”*

Caesar, who had observed an analogous com¬ munism among the Germans who had invaded Belgium and Gaul, states that one of the objects

•Hobbes, one of the great thinkers of modern times, thought not otherwise. “Nature hath given to each of us an equal right to all things,” says Hobbes in “De Cive.” “In a state of nature every man has a right to do and to take whatsoever he pleases : whence the common saying that Nature has given all things to all men, and whence it follows that In a state of nature utility is the rule of right.”

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

33

of their customs was “to uphold in the people the sense of equality, since every man sees his re¬ sources equal to those of the most powerful.” And, in effect, this communism in production and consumption presupposes a perfect equality among all the members of the clan and tribe who consider themselves as derived from a common stock. But not only did this rudimentary com¬ munism maintain equality; it developed, also, sentiments of fraternity and liberality which put to shame the much vaunted brotherliness and charity of the Christian, and which have elicited the admiration of the observers of savage tribes before they had been deteriorated by the Bible and brandy, the brutal mercantilism, and pesti¬ lential diseases of civilization.

At no subsequent period of human develop¬ ment has hospitality been practiced in so simple and perfect a way. “If a man entered an Iro¬ quois house,” says Morgan, “whether a villager, a tribesman, or a stranger, and at whatever hour of the day, it was the duty of the women of the house to set food before him. An omission to do this would have been a discourtesy amounting to an affront. If hungry, he eats, if not hungry, courtesy required he should taste the food and thank the giver.”

“To be narrow-hearted, especially to those in want, or to any of their own family, is accounted a great crime, and to reflect scandal on the rest of the tribe,” says another student of the primitive manners of the American Indians.* A guest was

•James Adair. “History o f the American Indians.” London, 1775.

34

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

held sacred, even though an enemy. Tacitus describes the same usages among the barbarian Germans who invaded the Roman Empire. “No people,” he says, “are more addicted to social entertainments, or more liberal in the exercise of hospitality. To refuse any person whatever ad¬ mittance under their roof is accounted flagitious. Everyone according to his ability feasts his guest ; when his provisions are exhausted, he who was late the host is now the guide and companion to another hospitable board. They enter the next house, and are received with equal cordiality. No one makes a distinction with respect to the rights of hospitality between a stranger and an acquaintance.”

Tacitus held up the barbarian Germans as an example to his civilized compatriots. Catlin, who, during a period of eight years, from 1832 to 1839, sojourned amongst the wildest Indian tribes of North America, writes: “Morality and virtue, I venture to say, the civilized world need not undertake to teach them.”

Travelers, who were not ferocious and rapa¬ cious commercial travelers like Mr. Stanley, have not hesitated to bear testimony, with Caesar, to the virtues of the savages, and to attribute those virtues to the communism in which they lived. “The brotherly sentiments of the Redskins,” says the Jesuit Charlevoix, “are doubtless in part as- cribable to the fact that the words mine and thine, ‘those cold words/ as St. John Chrysostomos calls them, are all unknown as yet to the savages. The protection they extend to the orphans, the widows and the infirm, the hospitality which they exercise

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

35

in so admirable a manner, are, in their eyes, but a consequence of the conviction which they hold that all things should be common to all men.”* So writes the Jesuit Charlevoix. Let us hear what his contemporary and critic, the free-thinker Lahontan, says : “Savages do not distinguish be¬ tween mine and thine, for it may be affirmed that what belongs to the one belongs to the other. It is only among the Christian savages who dwell at the gates of our cities that money is in use. The others will neither handle it nor even look upon it. They call it : the serpent of the white men. They think it strange that some should possess more than others, and that those who have most should be more highly esteemed than those who have least. They neither quarrel nor fight among themselves ; they neither rob nor speak ill of one another.”t

II

So long as the savage hordes, composed of 30 or 40 members, are nomadic, they wander, on the face of the earth, and. fix wherever they find the means of sustenance, it isTprobablyTinlolIow- ing the sea-shores and the course of the rivers which supplied them with food that the savages peopled the continents. Such was the opinion of Morgan. The Bushmen and the Veddahs of Ceylon, who live in this state of savagery, do not dream of vindicating the right of property even

•Charlevoix. “Histoire de la Nouvelle France.” t“Voyage de Lahontan,” II.

36

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

in the territories of the chase — the most archaic form of landed property.

Primitive man, who does not till the soil, and who supports himself by hunting and fishing, and lives on a diet of wild fruits, eked out by milk, must have access to vast territories for his own sustenance and that of his herds : it has been com¬ puted, I know not with what accuracy, that each savage, for his subsistence, requires three square miles of land. Hence, when a country begins to be populous, it becomes necesgaryytoaiyide the Tandamong the t rib ess

~~~The earliest distribution of the_iand was into pasture andHerritories of chase common , to the ' tribe, for the idea of individual ownership of the lancj is of ulterior ~and~tardier growth. "The earth is like fire arid water, that carifiot be sold,” say the Omahas. The Maoris are so far from conceiving that the land is vendible, that, “al¬ though the whole tribe might have consented to a sale, they would still claim with every new-born child among them an additional payment, on the ground that they had only parted with their own rights, and could not sell those of the unborn. The government of New Zealand could settle the difficulty only by buying land for a tribal annuity, in which every child that is born acquired a share.” Among the Jews and Semitic peoples there was no private property in land. “The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” (Leviticus xxv., 23.) Christians set the commandment of their God at defiance. Full of reverence as they are for Jehovah and His laws,

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

37

still greater is their veneration for almighty Capital. 8 J

Mankind underwent a long and painful process of development before arriving at private prop¬ erty in land.

Among the Fuegians vast tracts of unoccupied land circumscribe the territories of chase belong¬ ing to the tribe. Caesar relates that the Suevi and Germans founded their pride upon having vast solitudes round their frontiers. ( Dc Bello Gallico iv., 3. ) Savage and barbarian peoples limit their territories^ by neutraT" zones, because an~aTip~n TounTupon thelands of any tribe is hunted like a wildbeast, and mutilated or put to death if takem AHeckewelder reports that the Redskins cut off the noses and ears of every individual found on their territory, and sent him back to inform his chief that on the next occasion they would scalp him. The feudal saying, Qui terre a, guerre a, held good in primitive times ; the viola¬ tions of the territories of chase are among the chief causes of dispute and warfare between neighboring tribes. The unoccupied areas, es¬ tablished to prevent incursions, came, at a later period, to serve as market places where the tribes met to exchange their belongings. Harold, in 1063, defeated the Cambrians, who made per¬ petual inroads on the territories of the Saxons ; he made a covenant with them that every man of their nation found in arms east of the intrench- ment of Offa should have his right hand cut off. The Saxons, on their side, raised parrallel trenches, and the space enclosed by the two walls became neutral ground for the merchants of both nations.

38

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

Anthropologists have noted with a feeling of surprise that the sexes among savage peoples are isolated and live apart; there is reason for sup¬ posing that this separation of the sexes was intro¬ duced when it was sought to put a stop to the primitive promiscuity and prevent the sexual in¬ tercourse that was the rule between brother and sister. This separation of the sexes within the limits of the tribe, necessary in the interests of morality, was upheld and promoted by a differen¬ tiation of pursuits and by property. The man is habitually charged with the defense and the procuring of food, while on the woman devolves the culinary preparation of the food, the fabrica¬ tion of the clothes or household utensils, and the management of the house once it has sprung into existence.* It is, as Marx observes, the division of labor which begins and which is based on sex : property, in its origin, was confined to a single sex.

The man is__a_hunter ajicL a warrior : he pos¬ sesses the horses and arms ; to the woman belong the household utensils and other objects appro¬ priate to her pursuits ; these belongings she is obliged to transport on her head or back, in the same way that she carries her child, which belongs to her and not to the father, generally unknown.

The introduction of agriculture enhanced the separation of the sexes, while it was the determin¬ ant cause of the parcelling of the lands, the com¬ mon property of the tribe. The man continues a warrior and a hunter ; he resigns to his wife the

*“A man,” said a Kuraai to Fison, “hunts, fishes, fights, and sits down,” meaning that all besides is the business of the woman.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

39

labor of the fields consenting, on occasion, to as¬ sist at harvest time; among pastoral peoples he reserves to himself the care of the flocks and herds, . which comes to be looked on as a nobler pursuit than agriculture; it is, in truth, the less arduous of the two. The Kaffirs consider the tending of the herds as an aristocratic occupa¬ tion; they call the cow the black pearl. The earliest laws of the Aryans forbade agriculture, thought degrading, to the two highest classes, the Brahmins and the Kshattryas, or warriors. “For a Brahmin and a Kshattryas agriculture is blamed rtuousTas ‘tlTe^plougtl with the iron point in j ureslhe eartli AndThe beiilgs ifrTt.'’^ ^ -

ATTheTfslT oT a "thing consTiTufeT f he sole con¬ dition of its ownership, landed property, on its t- first establishment among primitive nations, was ^ allotted to the women. In all societies in which the matriarchal form of the family has maintained itself, we find landed property held by the woman ; such was the case among the Egyptians, the Nairs, the Touaregs of the African desert, and the Basques of the Pyrenees ; in the time of Ar¬ istotle two-thirds of the territory of Sparta be¬ longed to the women.

Landed property, which was ultimately to con¬ stitute for its owner a means of emancipation and ^ of social supremacy, was, at its origin, a cause of subjection; the women were condemned to the rude labor of the fields, from which they were emancipated only by the introduction of servile labor.

•Laws of Manu. Cap. x.

40

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

Agriculture, which led to private property in land, introduced the servile labor, which in the course of centuries has borne the names of slave- labor, bond-labor, and wage-labor.

Ill

So long as primitive communism subsists, the tribal lands are cultivated in common. “In cer¬ tain parts of India,” says Nearchus, one of Alex¬ ander’s generals, and eye-witness of events that took place in the 4th century, b. c., “the lands were cultivated in common by tribes or groups of relatives, who at the end of the year shared among themselves the fruits and crops.”*

Stephen cites a settlement of Maya Indians composed of 100 laborers, “in which the lands are held and wrought in common and products shared by all ”t

From Tao, an Indian village of New Mexico, Mr. Miller, in Dec. 1877, wrote to Morgan : “There is a cornfield at each pueblo, cultivated by all in common, and when the grain is scarce the poor take from this store after it is housed, and it is in the charge and at the disposal of the Cacique, called the Governor.” In Peru, prior to the Spanish Conquest, agricultural labor pos¬ sessed the attraction of a feast. At break of day, from an eminence, or a tower, the whole of the population was convoked — men, women, and children, who all assembled in holiday attire and adorned with their most precious ornaments. The

•Nearchus apud Strabo, lib xv.

t Stephen. * ‘Incidents of a trayel in Yucatan,* ‘ II.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

41

crowd set to work, and sang in chorus hymns celebrating the prowess of the Incas. The work was accomplished with the utmost spirit and en¬ thusiasm.* Caesar relates that the Suevi, the most warlike and most powerful of the Germanic tribes, annually sent forth to combat a hundred men from a hundred cantons. The men that stayed at home were bound to maintain the men engaged in the expedition ; the following year jt was the combatants who remained at home and the others who took up arms ; in this way, he adds, the fields were always cultivated and the men practiced in war. ( De Bello Gallico, IV. 1.)

The Scandinavians who ravaged Europe had similar communistic practices, combined with warlike expeditions ; the latter over, they returned home to assist their wives in gathering in the harvest. This cultivation in common long sur¬ vived the status of primitive communism. In the Russian villages which are under the regime of collective or consanguine property, a certain tract of land is often cultivated in common and is called mirskia zapaschki (fields tilled by the mir) ; the produce of the harvest is distributed among the families of the village. In other places the arable lands are tilled jointly, and are afterwards allotted to the families. In several communities of the Don the meadows elsewhere portioned out remain undivided, the mowing is performed in common, and it is only after the hay is made that the partition takes place. Forests, also, are cleared in common. The co-operative plowing

•W. Prescott. “Conquest of Peru.”

42

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

and digging practiced in the village communi¬ ties ought probably to be referred to the period of communist agriculture. In Fiji, when pre¬ paring a piece of ground, a number of men are employed, divided into groups of three or four. Each man being furnished with a digging stick, they drive them into the ground so as to enclose a circle of about two feet in diameter. When by repeated strokes the sticks reach the depth of 18 inches, they are used as levers, and the mass of soil between them is then loosened and raised. Mr. Gomme cites, after Ure, an analogous prac¬ tice of the Scotch highlanders.

Caesar shows us how the Germans set out an¬ nually on predatory expeditions ; the booty was, probably, divided among all the warriors, includ¬ ing those who had remained at home to perform the agricultural labor of the community. The Greeks of prehistoric times, also, were audacious pirates, who scoured the Mediterranean and fled with their booty to their citadels, perched on the tops of promontories like eagles’ nests, and as inexpugnable as the round towers of the Scan¬ dinavians, built in the midst of the waters. A precious fragment of a Greek song, the Skolion of Hybrias, presents us with a picture of the heroic lives of the Greeks. The hero says: — “I have for riches a great lance, and my sword, and my buckler, the rampart of my body ; with these I till the ground and reap the harvest and vin¬ tage the sweet juice of the grape; thanks to these I am styled the master of the mnoia (the slaves of the community). Let those who dare not bear the lance and the buckler kneel to me

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

43

as to a master and call me the great king.” Piracy is the favorite pursuit of prehistoric times. Nestor inquires of Telemachus, his guest, if. he is a pirate (Odyssey III). Solon main¬ tained a college of pirates at Athens (Institutes of Gaius), and Thucydides states that in ancient times piracy was honorable (I., sec. 5).

Wherever the heroes landed, they carried off men, women, cattle, crops, and movables ; the men became slaves and common property ; they were placed under the supervision of the women, and cultivated the lands for the warriors of the clan. All of the cities of Crete, one of the first islands colonized by these bold pirates, possessed, down to the time of Aristotle, troops of slaves, called mnotie, who cultivated the public do¬ mains. The Greek cities maintained, besides a public domain, public slaves, and upheld common repasts similar to those described by Heraclides.*

Mr. Hodgson, in 1830, described a village, thirty miles northwest of Madras, the inhabitants of which were assisted in their agricultural op¬ erations by slaves who were common property ; for they were transferred with the other priv¬ ileges of the village occupants when those priv¬ ileges were sold or mortgaged. The mediaeval towns and even villages had serfs in common. t / Thus we see that everywhere property in land and its produce, in domestic animals, serfs and

•The Greek slaves were divided into two classes, the pnblic slaves ( Koine douleia) belonging to the state, and the slaves be¬ longing to private individuals, called Klerotes, 1. e., adjudged by lot. Athens possessed a number of public slaves, who did not cultivate the soil, but discharged the functions of executioner, police agents, and Inferior employes of the administration.

■(•Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1830, vol. 11.

44

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

slaves, was primarily property common to all the members of the clan. Communism was the cradle of humanity; the work of civilization has been to destroy this primitive communism, of which the last vestiges that remain, in defiance of the rapacity of the aristocrat and the bourgeois, are the communal lands. But the work of civiliza¬ tion is twofold : while on the one hand it destroys, on the other hand it reconstructs ; while it broke into pieces the communist mould of primitive humanity, it was building up the elements of a higher and more complex form of communism. I am here concerned to trace out civilization in its double movement of destruction and recon¬ struction.

CHAPTER III

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

I

The common tribal property began to break up as the family was being constituted. A few remarks respecting the family will render an ex¬ position of the evolution of property more in¬ telligible to the reader.

We are at present aware that the human species, before arriving at the patriarchal form of the family, in which the father is the head, possesses the estates and transmits his name to all his children, passed through the matriarchal form, in which the mother occupied that high_po- sjtion._ We have seen, above, the whole clan liv¬ ing in great joint tenement houses, containing a certain number of rooms for the married women. The private family is then nascent ; when we find it constituted in the matriarchal or patriarchal form, a segmentation has ensued of the commu¬ nal house into as many private houses as there are households. In the matriarchal family the mother lives with her children and her younger brothers and sisters ; receiving her husbands, who belong to a different clan, each in his turn ; it is then that family property makes it appear¬ ance.

Its beginnings were modest, for, at the outset,

45

46 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

it consisted but of the cabin and the small garden surrounding it. Among certain people the patri¬ archal family may have been constituted and have superseded the matriarchal family prior to the constitution of family property, but the case is not universal ; on the contrary it would seem that the revolution in the family was posterior to the formation of family property. Such was the case with the Egyptians, Greeks, and many other peoples the course of whose development was a normal one, undisturbed by the invasion of na¬ tions on a higher plane of civilization.

So long as the matriarchal form subsists, the movables and immovables are transmitted by the women ; a person inherits from his mother and not from his father, or the relations of his father. In Java, where this form of the family reached a high pitch of development, a man’s property reverts to his mother’s family; he is not at lib¬ erty to make a donation to his children, who be¬ long to the clan of his wife, without the consent and concurrence of his brothers and sisters. If we judge from what we know of the Egyptians and other peoples, the male occupied a very sub¬ ordinate position in the matriarchate. Among the Basques, who have preserved their primitive customs, notwithstanding Christianity and civ¬ ilization, when the eldest daughter, on her mother’s death, becomes an heiress, she becomes at the same time the mistress of her younger brothers and sisters. The male is under the tute¬ lage of his own family, and when he “goes out” to get married, with his sister’s approbation, he falls under the dominion of his wife; he is sub-

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 47

jected throughout life to female authority, as son, brother and husband ; he possesses nothing save the small peculium which his sister gives him on his marriage. “The husband,” says a Basque proverb, “is his wife’s head servant.”

This elevated position of the woman affords a proof, let me observe in passing, that the physical and intellectual superiority of the male, far from being a primordial physiological necessity, is but the consequence of an economical situation, per¬ petuated during centuries, which allowed the male a freer and fuller development than it per¬ mitted to the female, held in bondage by the family. Broca, in the course of his discussion with Gratiolet on the relation of the brain weight and cranial, capacity to the, intelligence, conceded that the inferiority^ of.. the-4emal£_jiiight Jbe_due merely to an inferior education. M. Manouvrier, a cfiscipTeof Broca^and Professor at the Paris School of Anthropology, has demonstrated that the cranial capacities of the males of the Stone Age, which he had measured, were nearly as great as the average cranial capacities of the modern Parisians, whereas the cranial capacities of the females of the Stone Age were consider¬ ably greater than those of the modern female Parisians.*

Most disastrous has been the effect on the human species of this female inferiority; it has

•The following are M. Manouvrler’s figures :

Average cranial capacity of modern Parisians.

Number of skulls Capacity in cubic

measured. centimeters.

77 male. 1560.

41 female. 1338.

48 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

been one of the most active causes of the de¬ generation of civilized nations.

Without going to the length of pretending that in all countries the ascendancy of the female assumed the proportions which it attained in Egypt, it is an indubitable fact that wheresoever we meet with the matriarchal family we can note a dependency of the men upon the women, coin¬ ciding, frequently, with a degree of animosity between the sexes, divided into two classes. Among the Natchez and among all the nations of the valley of the Mississippi, the term zvoman, applied to a man, was an affront. Herodotus relates that Sesostris, in order to perpetuate the memory of his glorious achievements, erected obelisks among the conquered nations, and that to mark his contempt for those who had offered him no resistance he caused the female sexual organ to be engraved thereon, as emblematic of their cowardice. To apply to a Homeric Greek the epithet zvoman was a grave insult. On the other hand, the warlike women of the tribes of Dahomey employ the word man by way of an injurious epithet. Unquestionably it was the desire to shake off this feminine ascendancy and to satisfy this feeling of animosity which led man to wrest from woman the control of the family.

Average cranial capacity of men and women of the Stone Age.

Number of skulls

measured. Capacity.

58 male. 1544.

30 female. 1422.

Thus the average cranial capacity of the male savage is Inferior by 26 cubic centimeters, whereas the average cranial capacity of the female savage is superior by 84 c.c. — -L. Manouvrier. “De la quantity’ de 1’encephale.” — Memoire de la SocigtS d' Anthropologic de Paris, III. 2nd fascicule, 1885.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 49

Presumptively this family revolution was ac¬ complished when the movable goods of individ¬ ual property had multiplied; and when the fam¬ ily estate was constituted, and had been consecrated by time and custom ; it was worth the men’s while, for the nonce, to dethrone the women. There took place a positive disposses¬ sion of the women by the men, accomplished with more or less brutality, according to the nations ; while in Lacedsemonia the women conserved a measure of their former independence (a fact which caused Aristotle to say that it was among the most warlike peoples that the women exer¬ cised their greatest authority), at Athens, and in the maritime cities engaged in commerce, they were forcibly expropriated and despoiled. This dispossession gave rise to heroic combats ; the women took up arms in defence of their priv¬ ileges, and fought with such desperate energy that the whole of Greek mythology and even recorded history have preserved the memory of their struggles.

So long as property was a cause of subjection, it was abandoned to the women ; but no sooner had it become a means of emancipation and su¬ premacy in the family and society than man tore it from her.

Without entering more specially into the his¬ tory of its evolution, I would lay stress upon this point, to-wit, that the family, wherever or however constituted, whether affecting the matri¬ archal or patriarchal form, invariably breaks up the communism of the clan or tribe. At first the clan was the common family of all its mem-

50 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

bers ; afterwards there came to exist private families, having interests distinct from those of the clan considered as an aggregate of a number of families; the communal territory of the tribe was then parcelled out so as to form the collective property * of each family.

The existent European family must not be con¬ sidered as the type of the family founded on collective property. The family was not reduced to its last and simplest expression, as it is in our day, when it is composed of the three indispen¬ sable elements : the father, the mother, and the children ; it consisted of the father, the recog¬ nized head of the family collectivity ; of his legiti¬ mate wife and his concubines, living under the same roof ; of his children, his younger brothers, with their wives and children, and his unmar¬ ried sisters : such a family comprised many mem¬ bers.

n

The arable lands, hitherto cultivated in com¬ mon by the entire clan, are divided into parcels of different categories, accordtng^ to the qualify of^ the soil'; the parcels are formed into lots, in such wiseThat each lot contains an equal propor¬ tion of the different descriptions of soil ; the number of lots corresponds to that of the fami-

•This form of property, under another name than that of col- lective property, which term I employ in contradistinction to the primitive communist form, has of recent years been the subject of extensive research. It has been investigated in Germany by Haxthausen, Maurer, Engels, etc. ; in England by Maine, Seebohm, Gomme, etc. ; in Belgium by Laveleye ; in Russia by Schepotief , Kovalesky, etc.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 51

lies. A portion of the land is reserved in view of a possible increase of the population ; it is let on lease or cultivated in common. To preclude injustice or grounds for complaint the shares were drawn by lot ;* hence, in Greek and Latin, the words which designate lot (sors, cleros) sig¬ nify also goods and patrimony.

If, when a family had complained of unfair¬ ness, they proved, on inquiry, that their complaint was justified, satisfaction was granted them by an additional allotment out of the reserve lands. The inquirers who have had opportunities of observing the way in which these partitions of the land are practiced, have been struck by the spirit of equality which presides over them, and by the ability o f the peasant land surveyors. Haxthausen relates how “Count de Kinsleff, the minister of the imperial domains, had in several localities of the government of Woronieje caused the land to be valued and surveyed by land taxers and land surveyors. The results went to show that the measurements of the peasants were in all respects, save for a few minor discrepancies, in perfect consonance with the truth. Besides, who knows which of the two were the more accurate?”!

The pasture lands, forests, lakes, and ponds, the right of hunting and fishing, and other rights,

•Dividing the land by lot has been everywhere the primitive mode of distribution. “The Lord commanded the children of Israel, entering the Land of Canaan, to divide the land by lot.” (Numbers xxxlii., 54; xxxvi., 2.)

f “Etudes sur la situation intgrieure, la vie nationale et les insti¬ tutions de la Kussie,” par le Baron A. de Haxthausen. French edi¬ tion of 1847.

52 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

such as the imposts raised on the caravans, etc., are the joint property of all the members of the clan.

The allotments are cultivated by each family under the direction of its chief and the super¬ vision of the village council ; the crops are the property of the family collectively, instead of be¬ longing, as at an earlier period, to the tribe or clan. A family is not allowed to cultivate their lot at pleasure, says Marshall. “They must sow their fields with the same grain as that of the other families of the community.”*

The system of cultivation is a triennial rota¬ tion: (1) corn or rye, (2) springs crops (barley, oats, beans, peas, etc.), (3) fallow. Not only the kind of seed to sow, but also the seed and harvest times, are prescribed by the communal council. Sir G. Campbell informs us that every Indian village possesses its calendar — Brahmin, or astrologist, whose buisness it is to indicate the propitious seasons for seed time and harvest. Haxthausen, an intelligent and impartial observer of the manners of the collectivist communes of Russia, remarks that “the most perfect order, resembling a military discipline, presides over the labors of the fields. On the same day, at the same hour, the peasants repair to the fields, some to plough, others to harrow, the ground, etc., and they all return in company. This orderliness is not commanded by the Starosta, the village ancient ; it is simply the result of that gregarious disposition which distinguishes the Russian peo-

•Marshall. “Elementary and Practical Treatise on Landed Prop¬ arty.” London, 1804.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 53

pie, and that love of union and order which ani¬ mates the commune.” These characteristics, which Haxthausen considers as peculiar to the Russian people, are but an outgrowth of the col¬ lective form of property, and have been observed in all parts of the world. We have seen that, to determine the seed time, the Indians did not obey human orders, but celestial considerations sug¬ gested by the astrologer. Maine, who in his quality of jurisconsult of the Anglo-Indian gov¬ ernment, was in a position to closely study the village communities, writes : —

“The council of the village elders does not command anything, it merely declares what has always been. Nor does it generally declare that which it believes some higher power to have commanded ; those most entitled to speak on the subject deny that the natives of India necessarily require Divine or political authority as the basis of their usages ; their antiquity is by itself as¬ sumed to be a sufficient reason for obeying them. Nor, in the sense of the analytical jurists, is there right or duty in an Indian village community; a person aggrieved complains not of an individ¬ ual wrong but of the disturbance of the order of the entire little society.”*

The discipline referred to by Haxthausen is a natural and spontaneous product, unlike the movements of an army or the maneuvers of the laborers on the bonanza farms of North Ameri¬ ca, which are produced to order. A Swiss cler¬ gyman, who wrote in the last century, teaches

*H. S. Maine. “Village Communities in the Bast and West,”

p. 68. '

54 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

us that in the canton of Berne there existed the same orderliness and ardor in work ob¬ served in Russia. “On an appointed evening,” he says, “the entire commune repairs to the communal meadows, every commoner choosing his own ground, and when the signal is given at midnight, from the top of the hill downwards, every man mows down the grass which stands before him in a straight line, and all that which he has cut till noon of the next day belongs to him. The grass which remains standing after the operation is trodden down and browsed by the cattle which are turned on to it.”*

The crops once got in, the lands allotted to the different families become common property again, and the villagers are free to send their cattle to depasture them.

Originally, the fathers of the families belong¬ ing to the clan, were alone entitled to a share in these allotments. It is only at a later period that the stranger settlers, having obtained the free¬ dom of the city after a term of residence, were admitted to the partition of the land. Landed property belonged to the fathers, whence patria, fatherland ; in the Scandinavian laws, house and fatherland were synonyms. At that time a man possessed a patria and political rights only if he had a right to a .share in the land. As a con¬ sequence, the fathers and males of the family alone were charged with the country’s defense ; they alone were privileged to bear arms. The

*“Essai sur l’abolitlon du parcours et sur le partage des Mens eommunaux,” par Sprungli de Neuenegg ; public par la SocietS D’Economie rurale de Berne (1763), cite par Neufcbateau, dans son Voyage agronomique dans la Senatorerie de Dijon, 1806.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 55

progress of capitalism consists in confiding the defense of the country to those who do not pos¬ sess an inch of land — who have no stake in the country — and to accord political rights to men who have no property.

Private property in land does not as yet ob¬ tain, because the land belongs to the entire vil¬ lage, and only the temporary usage of it is granted, on condition that it shall be cultivated according to the established customs, and under the supervision of the village elders charged with watching over the maintenance of those customs. The house alone, with its small enclosure, is the private property of the family ; among some peo¬ ples, e. g., the Neo-Caledonians, the tenement was burnt on the death of the chief of the fam¬ ily, as well as his arms, his favorite animals, and, occasionally, his slaves. According to all appear¬ ance, the house for a long time was distinguished from the land, as a movable ; it is so qualified in many customaries of France ; in that of Lille, among others.

The house is inviolable ; nobody has a right to enter it without the master’s consent. The jus¬ tice of the country was suspended at the thresh¬ old ; if a criminal had penetrated into the house, nay, if he had but touched the door-latch, he was secure from public prosecution and amenable only to the authority of the father of the family, who exercised the legislative and executive power within the precincts of the house. In 186 b. c., the Roman Senate having condemned to death some Roman ladies, whose orgies compromised public morals, was forced

56 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

to remit the execution of the sentence to the heads of the families ; for the women, as con¬ stituting a part of the household, were answer- able only to the master of it. To such extremes was this inviolability pushed in Rome that a father could not invoke the assistance of the magistrates or public force in case of his son’s resistance. In the Middle Ages this sanctity of the domicile still existed ; at Mulhouse, for ex¬ ample, a burgher shut up in his house ceased to be amenable to the justice of the town ; the court was bound to transport itself to his house door in order to judge him, and it was open to him to reply to the questions put to him from the window. The right of asylum possessed by the Church was merely a transformation of this sanctity of the house ; as we shall see hereafter, the Church was but a sort of communal house.

The habitations are not contiguous, but sur¬ rounded by a strip of territory. Tacitus, and numerous writers after him, have assumed that this insulation of the houses was prescribed as a measure of precaution against fire, so danger¬ ous in villages in which the houses are built of wood and thatched with straw. I am of belief that the reason for this very prevalent custom should be looked for elsewhere. It has been shown that the tribal territories were surrounded by a strip of uncultivated land, which served to mark the boundaries of other neighboring tribes ; in like manner the family dwelling is surrounded by a piece of unoccupied land in order to render it independent of the adjacent dwelling houses; this was the sole land which, subsequently, it was

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 57

permitted to enclose with palisades, walls, or hedges. In the barbarian codes it is known by the name of legal, legitimate court ( curtis legalis, hoba legitima ) ; in this spot was placed the fam¬ ily tomb. So indispensable was this insulation held to be that the Roman law of the Twelve Tables fixed the space to intervene the town houses at two-and-a-half feet.*

It was not the houses only, but also the family allotments of land which were isolated, so that the fear of fire could not have suggested the measure. A law of the Twelve Tables regulates that a strip of land, five feet in width, be left uncultivated. (Tablet VII., sec. 4.)

The breaking up of the common property of the clan into the collective property of the fami¬ lies of the clan was a more radical innovation than, in our day, would be a restitution of the landed estates to the community. Collective property was introduced with infinite difficulty, and only maintained itself by placing itself under Divine protection and the aegis of the law. I may add that the law was only invented for the purpose of protecting it. The justice which is other than the satisfaction of revenge, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth — the lex talionis — made its appearance in human society only after the establishment of property, for, as Locke says, “Where there is no property there is no injustice, is a proposition as certain as any demonstrated in Euclid. For the idea of property being a right to anything, and the idea to which the name in¬ justice is given being the invasion or violation

•Table VII., sec. 1. Restored text after Festus.

58 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

of that right.”* As the witty Linguet said to Montesquieu, “L’esprit des lois, c’est l’esprit de la propriete.”

Religious rites and ceremonies were instituted to impress upon the superstitious minds of primi¬ tive peoples the respect due to this private prop¬ erty of the family collectively, so greatly opposed to their communistic usages. In Greece and Italy, on appointed days of the month and year, the chief of the family walked round his fields, along the uncultivated boundary, pushing the victims before him, singing hymns, and offering up sacrifices to the posts or stones, the metes and bounds of the fields, which were converted into divinities — they were the Termini of the Ro¬ mans, the “divine bournes” of the Greeks. The cultivator was not to approach the landmark, “lest the divinity, on feeling himself struck by the plowshare, should cry out to him, ‘Stop, this is my field, yonder is thine.’ ” The Bible abounds in recommendations to respect the fields of one’s neighbor : “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s landmark.” (Deut. xix., 14.) “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s landmark.” Job, who has the soul of a land¬ lord, numbers among the wickedest the man “who removes the landmark.” (Job xxiv.) The Cossacks, with a view to inculcating on their children a respect for other people’s property, took them out for walks along the boundaries of the fields, whipping them all the way with rods. Plato, who drops his idealism when he

•Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding.” Book IV., chap, iii., sec. 18.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 59

deals with property, says, “Our first law must be that no man shall lay a hand on the boundary- mark which divides a field from his neighbor’s field, for it must remain unmoved. Let no man remove the stone which he has sworn to leave in its place.” (Laws, VIII.) The Etruscans called down maledictions on the heads of the guilty : “He who has touched or removed the landmark shall be condemned by the gods ; his house shall disappear ; his race become extinct ; his lands shall cease to bear fruit ; hail, rust, and canicular heat shall destroy his harvests ; the limbs of the culprit shall ulcerate and rot.”*

The spiritual chastisements, which make so deep an impression on the wild and fiery imagina¬ tions of primitive peoples, having proved inade¬ quate, it became necessary to resort to corporal punishments of unexampled severity — punish¬ ments repugnant to the feelings of barbarian peo¬ ples. Savages inflict the most cruel tortures on themselves by way of preparing for a life of per¬ petual struggle, but such tortures are never puni¬ tive ; it is the civilized proprietor who has hit upon the bene amat, bene castigat of the Bible. Catlin, who knew the savages of America well, states that a Sioux chief had expressed his sur¬ prise to him at having seen “along the frontier white men whip their children; a thing that is very cruel.”

The worst crime that a barbarian can commit is to shed the blood of his clan; if he kills one of its members the entire clan must rise up to take vengeance on him. When a member of a

♦Sacred formula cited by Fustel de Coulanges. Cite Antique.

60 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

clan was found guilty of murder or any other crime he was expelled, and devoted to the in¬ fernal gods, lest any should have to reproach himself with having spilt the blood of his clan by killing the murderer. Property marks its appearance by teaching the barbarian to trample under foot such pious sentiments ; laws are en¬ acted condemning to death all those who attack property. “Whosoever,” decrees the law of the Twelve Tables, “shall in the night furtively have cut, or caused to graze on, the crops yielded by the plow, shall, if he has reached puberty, be devoted to Ceres and put to death ; if he has not arrived at puberty he shall be beaten with rods at the will of the magistrate and condemned to repair the damage doubly. The manifest thief (i. e., taken in the act), if a freeman, shall be scourged with rods and delivered up to slavery. The incendiary of a corn-stack shall be whipped and put to death by fire.” (Table VIII., secs. 9, 10, 14.) The Saxons punished theft with death. The Burgundian law surpassed the Roman law in cruelty ; it condemned to slavery the wives and children under 14 years of age who had not denounced their husbands and fathers guilty of stealing a horse or an ox. (XLVII., sec. 1, 2.) Property introduced the common informer into the family.

These moral and material punishments, which are met with in all countries and which are everywhere alike ferocious,* abundantly prove

•Property is Invariably ferocious ; until quite recently thieve* were hanged after having suffered torture ; the forgers of banknote* in civilized Europe were formerly sentenced to death, and are still condemned to hard labor for life.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 61

the difficulty experienced by the collective form of property in introducing itself into the com¬ munist tribes.

Prior to the institution of collective property, the barbarian looked upon all the property be¬ longing to the tribe as his own, and disposed of it accordingly ; the Lacedaemonian, we have seen, had the right to enter private dwellings without any formalities and to take the food he required. The Lacedaemonians were, it is true, a compara¬ tively civilized people, but their essentially war¬ like existence had enabled them to preserve their ancient usages. The travelers who have fallen victims to this propensity of the barbarian to appropriate everything within his reach, have described him as a thief; as if theft were com¬ patible with a state of society in which private property is not as yet constituted. But as soon as collective property was established, the natural habit of appropriating what a man sees and cov¬ ets, became a crime when practiced at the ex¬ pense of the private property of the family, and, in order to set a restraint upon this inveterate habit, it was found necessary to have recourse to moral and physical punishment; justice and our odious criminal codes followed in the wake of collective property and are an outgrowth of it.

Collective property, if not the sole cause, was, at all events, the pre-eminent cause of the over¬ throw of the matriarchate by the patriarchate. The fate of the patriarchal family is intimately bound up with the collective form of property: the latter becomes the essential condition of its maintenance, and, so soon as it begins to break

62 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

up, the patriarchal family is likewise disinte¬ grated and superseded by the modern family; a sorry remnant, destined, ere long, to disappear.

Ancient society recognized the necessity of the integrity of collective property for the mainte¬ nance of the family. At Athens the State watched over its proper administration ; anybody being entitled to demand the indictment of the head of a family who maladministered his goods. The collective property did not belong to the father, nor even to the individual members of the family, but to the family considered as a collective entity which is perpetual, and endures from generation to generation.* The property belonged to the family in the past, present, and future; to the ancestors who had their altars and their tombs in it ; to the living members who were only usufructuaries, charged with continu¬ ing the family traditions, and with nursing the property in order to hand it down to their de¬ scendants. The chief of the family, who might be the father, the eldest brother, the younger brother, or, on occasions, the mother, was the administrator of the estate ; it was his duty to attend to the wants of the individuals who com¬ posed the collectivity ; to see that the lands were properly cultivated and the house kept in order, so that he might transmit the patrimony to his successor in the same state of prosperity in which he had received it at the death of his predecessor. To enable him to fulfill this mission the head of

•Among the Germans and the Bavarians they were known by the name of estates belonging to the genealogies (genealogiae) ; among the Ripuarian Franks under that of terrae aviatigae ; among the Anglo-Saions under that of ethel or alod parentum.

FAMILY OR CONSANCUINE COLLECTIVISM 63

the family was armed with despotic power; he was judge and executioner; he judged, con¬ demned, and inflicted bodily punishment on the members of the family under his control; his authority stretched so far as to empower him to sell his children into slave y, and to inflict the pain of death on all his suoordinates, including his wife, although she enjoyed the protection, sufficiently precarious, it is true, of her own family. The quantity of land distributed was generally proportionate to the number of males in the family ; the father, with a view to the pro¬ curing of servants to cultivate it, married his sons while still in infancy to adult women, who became his concubines. Haxthausen relates that in Russia one could see tall and robust young women carrying their little husbands in their arms.

The worn-out phrase “The family is the pillar of the state,” which modern moralists and poli¬ ticians reiterate ad nauseam since it has ceased to be exact, was at one time an adequate expres¬ sion of the truth. Where collective property exists, every village is a petty state, the govern¬ ment whereof is constituted by the council elected in the assembly of the family-chiefs, co- equals in rights and privileges. In India, where the collective form of property was highly de¬ veloped, the village had its public officers, who where artisans (wheelwrights, tailors, weavers, etc.), schoolmasters, pirests, and dancing women for public ceremonies ; they were paid by the vil¬ lage community, and owed their services to the members having ancestral shares in the land, but

64 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

not to stranger settlers. In the Greek republics the state maintained public prostitutes for the use of the males of the patrician families. Sir G. Campbell states, among other curious facts, that the smith and the artisans generally, were more highly remuneiated in the Indian villages than the priests.

The head man of the village, elected for his ability, his learning, and powers as a scorcerer, is the administrator of the property of the com¬ munity ; he alone is privileged to carry on com¬ merce with the exterior, that is, to sell the sur¬ plus of the crops and cattle, and to buy such objects as are not manufactured in the village. As Haxthausen observes : “Commerce is only car¬ ried on wholesale, which is of great advantage to the peasant, who, left to himself, is often un¬ der the necessity of selling his products below their real value, and at unfavorable moments. As commerce is in the hands of the chief, the latter is able from his connections with the chiefs of the neighboring villages to wait for a rise in prices, and take advantage of all favorable cir¬ cumstances before concluding a sale.” All those who are familiar with the deceptions practiced upon peasants by merchants will appreciate the justness of the observation of Haxthausen. The French bourgeois, who pounced upon Algiers and Tunis as on a prey, expressed great moral indig¬ nation at being prevented from entering into communication with the Arabs individually, and obliged to treat with the chiefs of the commu¬ nity ; they loudly and pathetically bewailed the unhappy lot of the wretched Arabs bereft of the

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 65

liberty of allowing themselves to be fleeced by the European merchants !

Petty societies, organized on the basis of col¬ lective property, are endowed with a vitality and power of resistance possessed by no other social form in an equal degree.

“The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything that they want within themselves and almost independent of any for¬ eign relations,” says Lord Metcalfe. “They seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down, revolution succeeds to revolution ; Hindu, Pagan, Mogul, Mahratta, Sikh, English are all masters in turn ; but the village communities remain the same. In time of trouble they arm and fortify themselves ; a hos¬ tile army passes through the country, the village communities collect their cattle within their walls and let the enemy pass unmolested. If plunder and devastation be directed against themselves, and the force employed be irresistible, they flee to friendly villages at a distance ; but when the storm has passed over they return and resume their occupations. If a country remains for a series of years the scene of continued pillage and massacre, so that the village cannot be inhabited, the scattered villagers nevertheless return when¬ ever the power of peaceable possession revives. A generation may pass away, but the succeeding generation will return. The sons will take the places of their fathers, the same site for the vil¬ lage, the same positions for their houses; the same lands will be reoccupied by the descendants.

It is not a trifling matter that will turn

66 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

them out, for they will often maintain their posts throughout times of disturbance and convulsions, and acquire a strength sufficient to resist pillage and oppression with success.” Farther on he adds : “The village constitution which can sur¬ vive all outward shock is, I suspect, easily sub¬ verted with the aid of our regulations and Courts of Justice by any internal disturbance ; litigation, above all things, I should think would tend to destroy it.”*

* Report of Select Committee of the House of Commons, 1832. The remarkable deposition of Lord Metcalfe is published in extenso in the appendix to Vol. XI.

Jurists, politicians, religious and socialist reformers have repeat¬ edly discussed the rights of property, and these discussions, how inter¬ minable soever, have always come back to the Initial point, to-wit, that property had been established by violence, but that time, which disfigures all things, had added grace and sanctity to prop¬ erty. Until recent years the writers of philosophies of human society ignored the existence of collective property. Baron Hax- thausen, who traveled in Russia in 1840, made the discovery, and published an acoeunt of it in his “Etudes sur la situation inter! - eure, la vie nationale et les institutions rurales de la Russie.” He remarked that the mir was the realization of the Utopianism of St. Simon, then in vogue. Bakounine and the liberal Russians, who had never so much as suspected the existence of collective property in Russia, now re-discovered Haxthausen’s discovery ; and as, in despite of their amorphous anarchism, they are above all things Russian Jingoes, who imagine that the Slav race is the chosen race, privileged to guide mankind, they declared the mir, that primitive and exhausted form of property, to be the form of the future ; it only remained for the western nations to obliterate their civilization and to ape that of the Russian peasants.

In virtue of the principle that it is hardest to see what lies under our eyes, Haxthausen, who had discovered the mir in Russia, was unable to perceive the remains of the Hark, so numerous in Germany ; he affirmed that collective property was a specialty of the Slavs. Maurer has the merit of having demonstrated that the Germans have passed through the stage of collective property; and. since Maurer, traces of it have been found in all countries and among all races. Before Haxthausen, the English officials in India had, indeed, called attention to this particular form of property in the provinces which they administered, but their discovery, buried in official reports, had obtained no publicity; but since the question has come under scientific observation it has been found that this same form had already been signalized by writers in the last, and in the first years of the present, centuries, notably by Le Grand d’Aussy, Francois de Neufchateau, in France, and the agronomist Marshall, in England.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 67

Bourgeois exploitation cannot tolerate, along¬ side of it, the collective form of property, which it destroys and replaces by private property, the adequate form of bourgeois property. What has taken place in India and Algeria has occurred in France. The village collectivities that had lasted throughout the entire feudal period, and sur¬ vived till 1789, were disorganized by the dis¬ solvent action of the laws during and after the bourgeois revolution. The great revolutionary jurist, Merlin suspect (so called because he had been the proposer of the sanguinary loi des sus¬ pects) did more towards bringing about the de¬ struction and confiscation of the communal lands of the village collectivities than the feudal lords had done in the course of centuries.

Over and above the reasons of a political char¬ acter which prompt monarchical governments to patronize the family organization based on col¬ lective property, there exist yet others, equally important, of an administrative character. As the collectivist village forms a number of admin¬ istrative units represented by the chief who di¬ rects it and trafficks in its name, the Govern¬ ment makes the latter responsible for the levying of the taxes and the recruiting of the militia, and charges him with additional functions which are not remunerated. In Russia the Imperial Gov¬ ernment lends its weight to the decisions of the communal council, incorporating into the army, and even despatching to Siberia, all those whose conduct is not approved of by the elders. In France, the monarchy anterior to 1789 exerted itself to uphold these peasant collectivist organi-

68 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

zations, assailed on the one hand by the feudal lords, who brutally despoiled them of their com¬ munal possessions and privileges, and on the other by the bourgeoisie, who seized upon their lands by every means.*

The feudal lords encouraged the organization of the peasants into family collectivities. Dalloz mentions a contract of the 17th century in which a lord causes his lands to be cultivated by meta¬ yers, on condition that the peasants shall have “in common, fire and food and live in perpetual community.” A legist of the 18th century, Dunod, furnishes us with the reason which led to the community of the cultivators : It is that “the seignorial domains are better cultivated, and the subjects better able to pay the tributes due to the lord when living in common than when forming separate households.”

Collective property, which destroyed the primi¬ tive tribal communism, established the family communism which secured all its members

•Russian revolutionary socialists believe in the mir, and are in favor of its maintenance. They opine that tha existence of a class of peasants living in collectivity must facilitate the establishment of agrarian communism. A socialist government, turning to account the communistic sentiments developed by collective property, might conceivably adopt measures favorable to the nationalization of the soil and its social cultivation ; but the establishment of a revolu¬ tionary socialist power in Russia is highly Improbable during the maintenance, as a general fact, of this form of property. All vil¬ lage collectivities, organized on the basis of the mir, are indepen¬ dent; they are self-sufficing, and keep up very imperfect relations among one another, and it is an easy matter for any government to stifle whatever disposition they might manifest for federation. This is what has come to pass in India. The English Government, with an army of 50,000 European soldiers, holds in subjection an empire as thickly peopled as Russia. The village collectivities united by no federative bonds are powerless to offer any considerable force of resistance. It may be asseverated that the surest basis of governmental despotism is precisely collective property, with the family and communal organization which corresponds thereto.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 69

against want. “The proletariat is not known in Russia,” wrote Haxthausen, “and so long as this institution (the mir ) survives, it can never be found here. A man may become impoverished here and squander his substance, but the faults or misfortunes of the father can never affect his children, for these holding their rights of the commune, and not of the family, do not inherit their father’s poverty.”

It is precisely this security against want af¬ forded by collective property which is offensive to the capitalist, whose whole fortune reposes on the misery of the working class.

Collective property is remarkable not only for the tenacity and indestructibility of the small peasant collectivities which it maintained, and the well-being which it afforded to the cultivators of the soil, but also for the grandeur of its achievements. In illustration whereof let me cite the marvellous works of irrigation in India and the terrace-culture of the mountain slopes of Java, covering, Wallace informs us, hundreds of square miles; “these terraces are increased year by year, as the population increases, by the in¬ habitants of each village working in concert un¬ der the direction of their chiefs, and it is, per¬ haps, by this system of village culture alone that such extensive terracing and irrigation has been rendered possible.”*

The collective form of property, traces of which have been met with wherever researches have been instituted, has survived for shorter or longer periods, according to the industrial and

•A. B. Wallace. "The Malay Archipelago, ” 18(59. Vol. I.

70 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

i

commercial development of the country in which it obtained. This form, created by the splitting up of the common property of the tribe, was bound to disappear in its turn, with the disinte¬ gration of the patriarchal family, in order to constitute the individual property of the several members of the dissolved family.

Private property, which was to succeed collect¬ ive property, grew out of it. The house and garden enclosed by walls and palisades were the private property, absolute and inalienable, of the family; no public authority had the right to trench on it. In the interior of the house the different members, not omitting the slaves, pos¬ sessed a peculium, some private property inde¬ pendent of that of the family ; this individual property, acquired by personal toil of its owner, was often considerable ; it consisted of slaves, cattle, and movables of various kinds. The right to a peculium was acquired slowly ; in the begin¬ ning no one member of the family could possess aught in severalty; all that he acquired reverted of right to the community.

The arable and pasture lands of which the family had but the usufruct became ultimately their private property, and when the family was broken up, i. e., when every male upon marrying quitted the collective dwelling for a house of his own, landed property shared the fate of personal property — it was divided amongst the children and was held in severalty.

The evolution of property, passing from the collective to the private form, has been extremely slow, so slow, indeed, that in many a country

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 71

collective property, but for an external impulse, might possibly have endured for centuries with¬ out suffering a change. Villages founded on collective property form economic units; that is to say, that they contain all they require for the intellectual and material wants of their inhabit¬ ants, and that contrariwise, they comprise few elements capable of determining change ; here all things are accomplished in accordance with traditions prescribed by the elders, and handed down like precious heirlooms. In effect, once a village has arrived at such a degree of indus¬ trial and agricultural development as to be capa¬ ble of satisfying the natural and simple wants of the villagers, it would seem that it no longer finds within itself any cause for change; an im¬ pulse from without is required to set it in motion.

Agriculture, which was the determinant cause of the parcelling out of the common tribal prop¬ erty, was, moreover, one of the causes of the splitting up of collectivist property. In propor¬ tion as improved methods of culture were intro¬ duced, the peasants recognized that one year’s possession was insufficient to reap the benefits of the manures and labor incorporated with the lands that had been allotted them. They de¬ manded that the partitions, hitherto annual, should in future take place every two, three, seven, and even twenty years : in Russia the gov¬ ernment was constrained to impose the partitions on the talcing of the census ; the peasants call them black, i. e., bad partitions, which shows how uncongenial they were to the families who con¬ sidered that they had proprietary rights in the

72 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

lands which had been given them at the last dis¬ tribution. Hence, it was the arable lands to which improved methods were first applied, which finally became inalienable ; whereas the pasture continued to be apportioned annually. So long as the arable lands are not private prop¬ erty, the trees planted in the communal lands belong to those who have planted them, even though they grow in territory which is subject to periodical partition.

In the villages in which collective property ob¬ tains all the chiefs of families are co-equals ; they all possess an equal right to a share in the allot¬ ment of the lands, because all originally be¬ longed to the same clan ; the strangers who have come to reside there as artificers, fugitives, or prisoners of war, are entitled, after having ob¬ tained the freedom of the city, which corresponds to the antique adoption by the clan, to share in the territorial partition equally with the original inhabitants. This admission of strangers was feasible only so long as the villages grew slowly and as the land to be disposed of remained abun¬ dant : the populous villages were forced to dis¬ seminate, to send forth colonies and to clear the neighboring forests. Every family was free, in¬ deed, to make clearances outside a given limit and during a stated period, and was held to have a possessory right in the lands which it had brought under culture. But this abundance of un¬ cultivated land began to fail in the villages situ¬ ated near the seashore or by the riverside, which, owing to their more favored position, attracted a larger number of strangers. Into these villages, which grew into small towns, it became difficult

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 73

to gain admisison, and for a right of sojourn certain fees were levied.*

The new-comers were excluded from the terri¬ torial partitions, from the right of common of pasture, and from the administration of the towns ; these rights were strictly limited to the primitive families, who constituted a privileged body, a sort of communal aristocracy, to-wit, the municipal aristrocracy, opposed alike to the feudal or warlike aristocracy and to the alien artificers. The latter, in order to resist the continual aggres¬ sions of the communal aristocracy, formed trade corporations. This division of the members of the city was throughout the Middle Ages a con¬ stant source of intestine warfare.

A degree of inequality crept into the primitive families : it would happen that to one family fell an undue share of allotments ; that others, in or¬ der to discharge their debts, were compelled to relinquish the enjoyment of their lots, and so forth. This engrossing of the land profoundly wounded the sentiments of equality which had not ceased to animate the members of the col¬ lectivist villages. Everywhere the monopolizers of land have been loaded with maledictions ; in Russia they are called the community-eaters ; _ in Java it is forbidden to claim more than one in¬ heritance. Isaiah exclaims: “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field,

•In his “Histolre des blens Communaux jusqu’au XIII. si8cle,” 1850, M. RlviSre cites an ordonnance of 1223, which states that eTery stranger for the right of sojourn at Rheims must pay a bushel of oats and a hen to the archbishop, eight crowns to the mayor, and four to the aldermen. The archbishop is the feudal lord; the con¬ tributions due to him are comparatively insignificant, whereas those Exacted by the mayor and aldermen, who belong to the communal Nr municipal aristocracy, are very onerous for the period.

74 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.” (v. 8.)

But among the causes that operated most pow¬ erfully in bringing misery and disorganization into the village collectivities were the fiscal charges, as witness Anglo-India.

At the outset the taxes were paid in kind and proportionately to the nature of the harvest; but this mode of payment no longer answers the claims of a government which becomes central¬ ized ; it exacts money payment of the taxes in advance, taking no account of the state of the crops. The villagers, as a consequence, are con¬ strained to apply to the usurers, those pests of the village ; this vile brood, who are countenanced by the government, rob the peasant shamelessly ; they transform him into a nominal proprietor, who tills his fields with no other object than to pay off his debts, which increase in proportion as he discharges them. The contempt and hatred inspired by the usurers is widespread and in¬ tense ; if the anti-Semitic campaign in Russia has given rise to such sanguinary scenes in the vil¬ lages, it is because the peasant made no distinc¬ tion between the Jew and usurer; many an orthodox Christian who needed not to be cir- cumcized in order to strip the cultivators as clean as ever the purest descendant of Abraham could have done, was robbed and massacred during the height of the fever of the anti-Semitic movement. These various causes co-operated with the de¬ velopment of industry and commerce to accelerate the monopolizing of the land, vested more and more in private families, and to precipitate the dissolution of the patriarchal family.

CHAPTER IV

FEUDAL PROPERTY

I

Feudal property presents itself under two forms ; immovable property, called corporeal by the French feudists, consisting of a castle or manor with its appurtenances and surrounding lands, “as far as a capon can fly and movable or incorporeal property, consisting of military serv¬ ice, aids, reliefs, fines, tithes, etc.

Feudal property, of which ecclesiastical prop¬ erty is but a variety, springs up in the midst of village communities based on collective property, and evolves at their expense ; after a long series of transformations it is resolved into bourgeois or capitalist property, the adequate form of pri¬ vate property.

Feudal property, and the social organization which corresponds thereto, serve as a bridge from family, or, more correctly, consanguine col¬ lectivism to bourgeois individualism.

Under the feudal system the landlord has obli¬ gations and is far from enjoying the liberty of the capitalist — the right to use and abuse. The land is not marketable ; it is burdened with com ditions, and is transmitted according to tradi¬ tionary customs which the proprietor dares not infringe ; he is bound to discharge certain defined

76

FEUDAL PROPERTY

duties toward his hierarchical superiors and in¬ feriors.

The system, in its essence, is a compact of reciprocal services ; the feudal lord only holds his land and possesses a claim on the labor and har¬ vests of his tenants and vassals on condition of doing suit and service to his superiors and lend¬ ing aid to his dependents. On accepting the oath of fealty and homage the lord engaged to protect his vassal against all and sundry by all the means at his command; in return for which support the vassal was bound to render military and personal service and make certain payments to his lord. The latter, in his turn, for the sake of protection, commended himself to a more puissant feudal lord, who himself stood in the relation of vas¬ salage to a suzerain, to the king or emperor.

All the members of the feudal hierarchy, from the serf upwards to the king or emperor, were bound by the ties of reciprocal duties. A sense of duty was the spirit of feudal society, just as the lust of lucre is the soul of our own. All things were made to contribute to the impressing it upon the minds of great and small alike. Pop¬ ular poetry, that primeval and all-powerful in¬ strument of education, exalted duty into a relig¬ ion. Roland, the epic hero of feudalism, assailed and overwhelmed by the Saracens at Roncevalles, upbraids his companion-in-arms, Oliver, who complains of Charlemagne’s desertion of them, in this wise:

FEUDAL PROPERTY

77

“Ne dites tel ultrage.

Mai seit de l’coer ki el piz se cuardet!

Nus remeindrum en estal en la place;

Par nus i iert e li colps e li caples.”

“Pur sun seignur deit hum suffrir granzmals;

E endurer e forz freiz e granz calz Si’n deit hum perdre del’sanc e de la earn Fier de ta lance e jo de Durendal,

Ma bone espee que li Reis me dunat Se jo i moerc, dire poet ki l’avrat,

Que ele fut a nobilie vassal!”*

‘“Speak not such outrage.

Curse on the heart that cravens in the breast!

Fast in the place will we maintain our stand.

And blows and sword-thrusts shall be dealt by us.”

“Much evil must one suffer for his lord;

Endure alike the hard cold and high heat ;

And for him must one lose his blood and bone!

Fight with thy lance, as I with Durendal,

My good sword that my king did give to me ;

And If I die, who gets it well may say,

Right noble was the vassal owned the sword !”

— “Chanson de Roland,” secs, xciii. and xciv.

The song of Roland was frequently sung at the beginning of a battle. At Hastings, when the two hostile armies were face to face, “the Earl” (William, Earl of Normandy), says William of Malmes¬ bury, commenced the song of Roland, “that the warlike example of that man might stimulate the soldiers.” According to Wace, the Trouvere, the song was sung by the Norman, Taillefer :

“Taillefer ki moult bien cantout Sur un eheval gi tost alout,

Devant le Due allout cantant De Karlemaigne e de Rollant,

E d’Oliver e des vassals Qui moururent en Roncevals.”

Thus Englished by Sir Walter Scott : —

“Taillefer, who sang both well and loud,

Came mounted on a courser proud ;

Before the Duke the minstrel sprung And loud of Charles and Roland sung Of Oliver and champions mo Who died at fatal Roneevaux.”

As Taillefer sang he played with his sword, and, casting it high in the air, caught it again with his right hand, while all in chorus shouted the cry of “God aid us!”

78

FEUDAL PROPERTY

Consanguine collectivism had but created the communal unit ; feudalism called forth a provin¬ cial and national life by knitting together the in¬ dependent and insulated groups of a province or a nation by a reciprocity of duties and services. Viewed in this light feudalism is a federation of baronies.

The duties which the lord owed his serfs, ten¬ ants, and vassals were manifold and onerous, but with the decay of feudalism he shook off these duties, while, at the same time, he continued to exact and even aggravated, the dues and obli¬ gations which, originally, had been but the recom¬ pense of services he had rendered. Not content with neglecting his feudal duties, he raised a claim to the lands of his vassals, as also to the communal domains and forests. The feudists, justly stigmatized as “feudal pens,” maintained that the woodlands, forests, and mead¬ ows had immemorially belonged to the lord, who had merely resigned the usufruct thereof to his serfs and vassals. The English feudists made shorter work of it. They fabricated history and declared that at some period — “sometimes vaguely associated with the feudalization of Europe, some¬ times more precisely with the Norman Conquest — the entire soil of England was confiscated ; that the whole of each manor became the lord’s demesne ; that the lord divided certain parts of it among his free retainers, but kept a part in his own hands to be tilled by his villeins ; that all which was not required for this distribution was left as the lord’s waste ; and that all customs which cannot be traced to feudal principles grew

FEUDAL PROPERTY

79

up insensibly through the subsequent tolerance of the feudal chief.”*

The bourgeois historians and Merlin, the ter¬ rible jurist of the convention and destroyer of the communal lands, solicitous to trace the private form of property to the feudal period, adopted the interested thesis of the aristocrats. The history of the genesis and evolution of feudal property will prove the unsoundness of the feudists’ theory and show that seignorial property was built up by fraud and violence.

II

The feudal system appears as the hierarchical organization of authority, notwithstanding that it was the outgrowth of a society of equals ; but equality could never have brought forth despotism but for the co-operation, during centuries, of events which, for the understanding of that gene¬ sis, must be kept in mind.

The Teutonic tribes who had invaded Western Europe were a nomad population, in a state of barbarism nearly akin to that of the Iroquois tribes at the time of the discovery of America. Strabo tells us that the barbarians established in Belgium and in the Northeast of France were ignorant of agriculture, and lived exclusively on milk and flesh ; principally on pork, fresh or salt ;

*H. S. Maine, "Village Communities,” p. 84. This opinion was formulated, in his evidence before the Select Committee of the House of Commons which sat to consider the subject of enclosures, by a lawyer, Mr. Blamire, who, according to Mr. Maine, was “an official unusually familiar with English landed property in its less usual shapes.”

80

FEUDAL PROPERTY

that they possessed herds of swine — savage and dangerous as wolves — roaming at large in the im¬ mense forests which covered the country, and so abundant as to supply them with food and the means of buying the few articles they stood in need of. Strabo adds that the Gauls had similar manners, and that to know them it required but to contemplate the Germans of his time. When Caesar landed in England he found that the Brit¬ ons inhabiting Kent possessed much the same manners and customs as the Gauls ; they did not till the land ; they subsisted on a milk diet and on flesh, and were clad in skins. They painted their bodies blue in order to strike terror into their enemies, and had their wives in common by groups of ten or twelve, including brothers, fathers and sons.* In Europe and elsewhere the point of departure is the same.

The widest equality reigned among these bar¬ barians, who were all warriors and hunters, and whose manners and usages tended to preserve this heroic equality. When they settled and began to practice a rude kind of agriculture, they under¬ took warlike expeditions for the purpose of keep¬ ing up the exercise of fighting. A war chief of renown needed but to announce that he was start¬ ing on a campaign to see warriors flock to him, eager for spoils and glory. During the expedi¬ tion they owed him obedience, as did the Greek warriors to Agamemnon, but they ate at the same table and banqueted with him without distinction of persons, and the booty was divided equally and by lot. Back again in their villages, they recovered

*“De Bello Galileo,” V., sec. 14.

FEUDAL PROPERTY 81

their independence and equality, and the war chief lost his authority.

It is in this free and equal fashion that the Scan¬ dinavians, and in fact all barbarians, organized their expeditions. These piratical manners pre¬ vailed during the whole of the middle ages ; when William the Conqueror and Pope Innocent III. wanted to levy an army against the English and the Albigenses, it was only necessary for them to promise a division of the spoils taken from the vanquished. Before the battle of Hastings, just as the troops were about to engage in fight, Wil¬ liam, with a loud voice, called out to his soldiers : “Fight bravely and put all to death ; if we win, we shall all be rich ; what I get, you shall get ; if I conquer, you will conquer ; if I obtain the land, you will obtain it.” His Holiness, the Pope, used similar language on the 10th of March, in the year 1208, on stirring up the faithful to fight the heretic Albigenses : “Up now, soldiers of Christ ; root out impiety by every means that God may have revealed to you (the means that the Lord had revealed were fire, rapine, and murder), drive out of their castles the Earl of Toulouse and his vassals, and seize upon their lands, that the ortho¬ dox Catholics may be established in the dominions of the heretics.” The Crusades which launched the warriors of Europe on the East were similarly organized, having the delivery of the Holy Sepul¬ chre for pretense and plunder for object.*

*A celebrated bourgeois economist, M. de Molinari, has inno¬ cently compared the financial enterprises of our times with the predatory expeditions of the Middle Ages. Both, indeed, aim at plunder,' but with this difference, that whereas the feudal warrior staked his life, the capitalists who gnaw, rat-like, at the 10 and 20 per cent Interest, risk their capital alone, which they have taken good oare not io create.

82

FEUDAL PROPERTY

, When rhe barbarians, in quest of territory, had conquered a country, they either put the inhabit¬ ants to death (as the Hebrews did, by Divine order), or contented themselves with ransacking the towns ; they settled in the country, which they set about cultivating in their own way, and al¬ lowed the vanquished to live alongside of them according to their own customs and usages. But when they became sedentary and cultivators of the land, they little by little lost their warlike habits, although some of them remained invinci¬ bly attached to the primitive manners. The Ger¬ mans observed by Tacitus had already lost some of their savage fierceness ; they had established themselves and become addicted to agriculture ; the tribe of the Catti, however, were dedicated to war. Always in the forefront of battle, they occu¬ pied the most dangerous posts ; they possessed neither houses nor lands, nor had they cares of any sort. Wherever they presented themselves they were entertained. These warriors formed a kind of standing army, charged with defending those of their countrymen who were engaged in agricultural pursuits.

But no sooner had the invading barbarians es¬ tablished themselves and lost their native vigor than other barbarians pounced upon them as on an easy prey, and treated them like a conquered people. During many centuries compact masses of barbarians overran Europe : in the east, the Goths, Germans, and Huns; in the north and west, the Scandinavians ; in the south, the Ara¬ bians ; desolating the towns and country in their passage. And when from east and north and

FEUDAL PROPERTY

83

south this human flood had ceased to pour down into Europe, and when the barbarians had lost their nomadic habits and resumed the work of civilization which they had arrested and frus¬ trated, there was unloosed another scourge ; bands of armed men overspread the country, plundering and ransacking and levying contributions on every side; the battle over, the soldiers of the hostile armies fraternized and started on an expedition on their own account.*

During many centuries people lived in continual fear of robbery, kidnaping and murder. The in¬ vasions of the barbarians that ruined and dis¬ organized the country did not prevent the tribes already settled from quarreling among them¬ selves. These constant internecine quarrels ren¬ der barbarian nations powerless in the face of strangers; they are unable to stifle their clan hatreds and their village feuds in front of a com¬ mon enemy. Tacitus, intent solely on the suprem¬ acy of the Romans, adjured the gods to foment this disastrous discord ; for, said he, “fortune can bestow no higher benefit on Rome than the dissen¬ sions of her enemies.”t

The inhabitants of the towns and provinces were constrained, for safety’s sake, to live in

•After the battle of Poictiers (1356) the soldiers, being ont of employment, associated and made war on their own behalf. In 1360, after the Treaty of Bretigny, which restored King John of France — a prisoner in England — to liberty, the soldiers of the two armies were dismissed. They formed themselves into bands and took the field. One band operated in the north, another, and mora considerable one, commanded by Talleyrand Perigord, descended into the valley of the Rhone, and after having ravaged La Provence passed through Avignon — where the Pope regaled the chiefs and gave absolution and a present of 500,000 ducats to the soldiers— eansacking the towns and laying waste the country.

t‘‘Germania.” 1, sec. xxvlii.

84

FEUDAL PROPERTY

fortified places. The charters of Auvergne of the 11th and 12th centuries designate such villages by the term of castra (camp). In the towns and boroughs houses were constructed in view of the necessity of sustaining a siege.

The village collectivities which, at the outset, were composed almost exclusively of individuals belonging to the same clan, and consequently equals, elected chieftains charged with their de¬ fense, who eventually came to gather into their hands the several rights of jurisdiction, of settling differences, of interpreting the customs, and maintaining order. The Franks in their barbar¬ ous Latin called such a chieftain grafUo, from graf, the German for count. The elected chiefs of the village collectivities are the feudal barons in embryo.

In the beginning they were simply public offi¬ cers subjected to the authority of the council of the elders and the popular assemblies, and with the execution of whose decisions they were charged ; they were severely punished for every neglect of duty.* The graffio of the Frankish tribes who omitted to expel a stranger whose expulsion had been voted by the assembly was amerced in a fine of 200 gold solidi. ( Lex Salica.) This was exactly the sum assessed as composition for murder. (Were gild).

*The customary of Beam began with a haughty declaration of inde¬ pendence. “These are the customs of Bearn, which show that of old there existed no lords in Beam. But the inhabitants, hearing praise of a knight of Bigorre, set forth in quest of him and made him a lord for the space of one year. But he being unwilling to conform to the customs ; the popular assembly of Pau summoned him to respect the customs ... he, refusing to obey, was killed In the asaembly.”

FEUDAL PROPERTY

85

The powers which were at a later date to be¬ come the appanage of the feudal lords, belonged to the community met in full assembly. ( Folk - moote.) All of the inhabitants were bound to at¬ tend in arms, under penalty of a fine; certain village collectivities possessed serfs, as, later on, did the lords.

The laws of Wales, collected in 940, by order of King Hoel-Du, and published in 1841 by A. Owen, indicate the mode of election and the qualities and the functions of these village chiefs which do not substantially differ from those of the barbarian war-chief. The chief of the clan was chosen by all the heads of families having wives and legitimate offspring, and he held his office for life; among certain peoples his functions were temporary and revocable. It was imperative “that he should speak on behalf of his kin and be listened to ; that he should fight on behalf of his kin and be feared ; that he should be security on behalf of his kin and be accepted.” When he administered justice he was assisted by the seven oldest villagers ; under his orders stood an avenger, charged with executing vengeance ; for justice at that epoch was but revenge — the lex talionis — blow for blow, wound for wound. On the first alarm, after the clamor, called haro by the Normans and biafor by the Basques, the in¬ habitants were bound to issue forth from their houses, in arms, and place themselves under their chieftain’s command; he was the military chief, to whom all owed fidelity and obedience. Who¬ ever failed to respond to his appeal was fined. In certain boroughs we find a military organiza-

86

FEUDAL PROPERTY

tion, e. g., at Tarbes the inhabitants were formed into tithings having at their head a tithing-man, whose office it was to see that all the men were armed and that their arms were in good condi¬ tion.*

All functions amongst barbarian tribes tend to become vested in certain families; the weaver’s, smith’s, priest’s, and magician’s callings are handed down from father to son ; it is in this way that castes arise. The chief, charged with the maintenance of order at home and the duty of defense abroad, was chosen out of the body of the inhabitants ; but little by little it became the habit to choose him out of the same family, which, ulti¬ mately, itself designated the chief of the commu¬ nity and omitted the formality of an election. It would be erroneous to suppose that in the begin¬ ning the chieftainship carried with it any special privilege; so far, indeed, was chieftainship from being coveted, that the man elected by the com¬ munity was made liable to a fine if he refused to accept the charge. At Folkestone, if either the mayor or any of the jurats refused to assume their respective offices upon being elected, “the com¬ moners were to go and beat down their principal messuage.” At Hastings it was a law that “if the bailiff will not accept the charge all the com¬ moners shall go and beat down his tenement.”-!-

Greatness was dangerous : the Scandinavians, in great calamities — in a pressing famine, for ex¬ ample — sacrificed their king, as the highest price

•L. Deyllle, “Etudes historiques sur Tarbes.” Bulletin d* la Societe Academique des Hautes Pyrenees, sixlgme annee, deni llyraison. 1861.

tGomme, “Village Communities,” p. 254.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

87

with which they could purchase the Divine favor. In this manner the first king of Vermaland, a province of Sweden, was burnt in honor of Odin, to put an end to a great dearth. Earl Hakon, of Norway, offered his son in sacrifice to obtain of Odin the victory over the Jomsburg pirates, and Gideon immolated his daughter to Jehovah for a similar reason.

The Indian village communities observed in our day have, for public officers, weavers, smiths, schoolmasters, brahmins, dancers, etc., who are in the service of the community, which rewards them by a lodging, an allowance of grain, and the allotment of a plot of land cultivated by the villagers.*

“In early Greece the demiurgoi seem to be the analogues of these Hindoo officials. Homer men¬ tions the herald, the prophet, the bard, all of whom, although we cannot trace their exact posi¬ tion, appear to have exercised some kind of pub¬ lic function. Among the Keltic clans similar classes are known to have existed.”!

The chiefs elected by the village collectivities were treated in the same way as the officers of the Hindoo villages : their companions, in reward of their services, allotted them a larger share of land than to the rest of the inhabitants. Thus, in the borough of Malmesbury, the alderman, who was

‘These pieces of land frequently bear the name of the trade of the exercise of which they were the reward. “There are,” says Maine, “several English parishes in which certain pieces of land in the comomn field have from time immemorial been known by the name of a particular trade ; and there is often a popular belief that nobody not following the trade can legally be the owner of the lot associated with it.”

tDr. Hearn, “Aryan Households,” p. 150.

88

FEUDAL PROPERTY

the chief man, was annually granted a piece of land, known as the “Alderman’s kitchen,” ip order that he might devote himself exclusively to the discharge of his office ; his fields were cultivated by the commoners, who allowed him a share in their harvest and live stock.*

At the outset no special distinction marks out the elected chief ; but the practice of continuously choosing him in the same family ended by creat¬ ing a privilege that was changed into a hereditary right ; the head of the privileged family became, by right of succession, and without requiring to submit to an election, the natural chief of the village. The royal authority had no other origin than this in the Frankish tribes. The leudes must be the heads of the families of the clan which are charged with furnishing the military chieftains ; just as, among the Hebrews, the tribes of Levy must furnish the priests. They resided with the king and were partakers of the royal councils ; upon occasions they resisted him and even offered him violence ; it was these leudes who elected the king, whose functions became hereditary.

The village collectivities were perpetually at war with one another ; in the partitions of the con¬ quered lands the share of the chieftain and his family was, doubtless, more considerable than that of the commoners ; to the privilege of birth was gradually superadded that of property.

On electing the village chief, the choice fell, we

•“The Basutos assemble every year to dig up and sow the field appropriated for the personal maintenance of their chief’s first wife. Hundreds of men, in a straight line, raise and lower their mattocks simultaneously and with perfect regularity. The entire village concurs in the maintenance of the chieftain.” Casalis, ‘‘The Basutos.”

FEUDAL PROPERTY

89

may presume, on the owner of the most spacious dwelling-house, affording the greatest facilities of defense and the best place of refuge for the peasants on an emergency. This strategical ad¬ vantage, which, originally, may have been a mat¬ ter of accident, came to be a condition exacted from every chieftain ; in the Indian villages be¬ yond the border the burj, or watch tower, is al¬ ways attached to the house of the chief, and in constant use as a place of refuge and observation. During the feudal period every lord was bound to possess a castle or fortified house having a courtyard protected by moats and drawbridges, a large square tower and a grist mill, to enable the peasants to shelter their crops and cattle, grind their corn and organize their defense. The chief¬ tain’s dwelling-house was considered as a sort of common house, and actually became such in times of danger. The members of the village collectivi¬ ties applied themselves to repairing and fortifying it, surrounding it with walls and trenches ; it was the custom for the members of a village to aid in the construction and repair of the houses of all the inhabitants without distinction. This custom is the origin of the right possessed by the feudal lord “to compel his vassals and tenants to con¬ tribute towards the construction of the fortifica¬ tions in time of war.” And the commentary of the feudal writer indicates the origin of the right. “And as these fortifications serve alike for the security of the country and the towns, the safety of persons, and the conservation of property, non¬ residents owning lands in the locality are bound to contribute towards the same.”

90

FEUDAL PROPERTY

The barbarians, who were more of warriors than of cultivators, defended their houses and villages themselves ; on the first alarm they rushed forth in battle array and placed themselves under the command of the chieftain, to assist him in beating back the aggressors ; in the watch tower they mounted guard by day and watched at night ; in many places the lord retained the right to exact from his vassals this service of watch and ward. But when agricultural habits began to get the upper hand, the peasants commuted this military service, which interfered with their pursuits, into a tribute to the chief ; on condition that he should maintain a body of men-at-arms, charged exclusively with the work of protection and de¬ fense. A proportion of every fine imposed on a delinquent was reserved for the chieftain and his men-at-arms. The chief was thus placed in a position to maintain an armed force which finally enabled him to impose his will and dominate his ancient companions.

The village built in the best strategical positions became a centre ; in the event of invasion the in¬ habitants of the adjacent villages flocked to it for refuge, and in return for the protection afforded them in the hour of danger they were called on to contribute towards the costs of repairing the fortifications and maintaining the men-at-arms. The authority of these village chiefs extended to the surrounding country.

In this natural manner were generated in the collectivist villages, all of whose members were equal in rights and duties, the first elements of feudalism ; they would have remained stable dur-

FEUDAL PROPERTY

91

ing centuries, as in India, but for the impulse of external events which disturbed them and infused them with new life. Wars and conquests de¬ veloped these embryonic germs, and by agglom¬ erating and combining them, built up the vast feudal system diffused during the Middle Ages, over Western Europe.

What in modern times has taken place in India helps us to realize the role of conquest in trans¬ forming the village chieftain into the feudal baron. When the English, established along the sea coasts, extended their dominion inland, they were brought into contact with villages organized in the maner described above ; every agricultural group was commanded by a peasant, the head¬ man, who spoke in its name, and negotiated with the conquerors. The English authorities did not trouble to inquire into the origin and precise na¬ ture of his powers, or of the office held by him in the community ; they preferred to take for granted that he was the master of the village of which he was but the represehtative, and to treat him as such ; they enhanced and solidified his authority by all the weight conferred by the right of the strongest, and on divers occasions assisted the head-man in oppressing his quondam companions, and despoiling them of their rights and posses¬ sions.

The mediaeval conquerors acted in an analogous fashion; they confirmed the local chiefs in their possession of those posts in the villages which were too unimportant to be bestowed as benefices on their liegemen, and, in return, made them responsible for the levying of the taxes and the

92

FEUDAL PROPERTY

conduct of their dependents, thereby according them an authority they had not previously pos¬ sessed in the village collectivities. But in every strategical place they installed one of their own warriors ; it was a military post which they con¬ fided to him ; the length of tenure of such posts, called benefices, was subject to variation; at first, they were revoked at pleasure, afterwards granted for life, and ultimately became hereditary. The beneficiary tenants took advantage of circum¬ stances to turn their hereditary possessions into alodial property, i. e., into land exempt from all obligations. In France the early kings were re¬ peatedly obliged to make ordinances against this kind of usurpation. “Let not him who holds a benefice of the emperor or the church convert any of it into his patrimony,” says Charlemagne in a capitulary of the year 803. (Cap. viii., s. 3.) But such ordinances were powerless to prevent the conversion of military chiefs into feudal barons. It may be said, therefore, that the feudal system had a dual origin ; on the one hand it grew out of the conditions under which the village collectivities evolved, and on the other it sprang from conquest.

The feudal barons, whether village-chiefs trans¬ mogrified by the natural march of events, or mili¬ tary chieftains installed by the conquerors, were bound to reside in the country which it was their duty to administer and defend. The territory they possessed and the dues they received, in the shape of labor and tithes, were the recompense of ser¬ vices rendered by them to the cultivators placed under their jurisdiction. The barons and their

FEUDAL PROPERTY

93

men-at-arms formed a permanent army, nourished and maintained by the inhabitants whom they directly protected.*

. The baron owed justice, aid, and protection to his vassals, and these, in their turn, owed fidelity and homage to their lord. At every change, con¬ sequent on the death of either lords or vassals, the vassal was bound, within a space of 40 days, to repair to the principal manor — there and not elsewhere, to indicate that he only swore fealty prospectively to a refuge in the baron’s castle ; if the lord was absent and had left no representative, the vassal made a vow of fealty in front of the manor-door, and caused the fact to be entered on the records. He was bound to come with his head uncovered and his belt ungirt, without sword and spurs, and to kneel down with his hands joined. The lord, in accepting his oath, took his vassal’s hands into his own, in token of union and protection. The vassal thereupon enumerated the lands and dependencies which he placed under the safeguard of his lord ; in early times he brought with him a clod of turf from his fields. Occasion¬ ally, too, the lord was the first to take his engage¬ ments toward his vassals. In the Fors de Bigorre (customary of Bigorre), it is said that the Comte de Bigorre, “before receiving the oath of the in¬ habitants of the land, delegated to that effect, shall himself take the oath that he will change nothing in the ancient customs, nor in such as he shall find the people in possession of ; he must

•In the Romance languages the original name of the feudal lord, the term baron, signified a strong man, a doughty warrior, which well indicates the essentially military character of feudalism. Vassal similarly bore the sense of brave, valiant.

94

FEUDAL PROPERTY

have his oath confirmed by that of four nobles of his domain.”

The vassal owed military service to his lord “when a foreign army had invaded his territory, when he wanted to deliver his besieged castle, or when he set out on a declared war” — a war, that is to say, entered upon in the interests of the in¬ habitants. But, although closely bound to him, the vassal might abandon his lord in certain cases specified in the capitularies of the years 813 to 816, to wit, if his lord had sought to kill him or reduce him to slavery, beaten him with a stick or sword, dishonored his wife or daughter, or robbed him of his patrimony.

So soon as the authority of the feudal nobility was constituted, it became, in its turn, a source of trouble to the country whose defense it had been charged with. The barons, in order to en¬ large their territories and extend their power, carried on continual warfare among themselves, only interrupted now and again by a short truce necessitated by the tillage of the fields. The wars of the barons may be compared to the industrial and commercial competition of modern times. The outcome is the same; both alike culminate in the concentration of property, and the social su¬ premacy which it bestows. The vanquished, when not killed outright or utterly despoiled, became the vassals of the conqueror, who seized upon a portion of their lands and vassals. The petty barons disappeared for the benefit of the great ones, who became potent feudatories, and estab¬ lished ducal courts at which the lords in vassal- age were bound to attend.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

95

It frequently happened that the barons turned highwaymen, who plundered the fields and robbed the towns and travelers; they deserved the epi¬ thets of gens-pille-hommes, gens-tue-hommes (killers and pickers of men) which were applied to them *

The towns were constrained to put themselves under the safeguard of the king or great feuda¬ tories, who concentrated the lands and feudal power, and changed the barons into courtiers. But in proportion as the petty barons disappeared, by so much the warfare slackened between castle and castle ; a measure of tranquillity was restored to the country, and the necessity for feudal pro¬ tection ceased to be paramount. The lords, conse¬ quently, were in a position to absent themselves from their domains and to betake themselves to the ducal and royal courts ; thither they went to play the courtier, and ceased to act as defenders of their vassals and dependents. From the hour that the cultivator no longer stood in need of mili¬ tary service, the feudal system had no reason to exist. Feudalism, born of warfare, perished by warfare ; it perished by the very qualities which had justified its existence.

•Vitry, the legate of Innocent III, who in Germany and Bel¬ gium preached the crusade against the Albigenses (in 1208), writes: “The lords, despite their titles and dignities, continue to sally forth for prey and to play the robber and brigand, desolating entire regions by Are.” The manners of the clergy were neither better nor worse. The Archbishop of Narbonne, at the end of the twelfth century, strolled about the fields with his canons and archdeacons, hunting the wild beasts, plundering the peasants, and violating the women. He had in his pay a band of Aragonese routiers wbom he employed to ransack the country. The bishops and abbots loved mightily, sings a troubadour, “fair women and red wine, fine horses and rich array ; living in luxury, whereas our Lord was con¬ tent to live in poverty.”

96

FEUDAL PROPERTY

But so long as the feudal system subsisted, there remained traces of the primitive equality which had been its cradle, even though every vestige had disappeared of the equality which had distinguished the relations of the lord with his tenants and vassals. The feudal lord and the vassal became co-equals once again in the com¬ munal assemblies which discussed the agricultural interests alike of the villager and the lord ; the assemblies met without his sanction, and despite his unwillingness to convoke them. His com¬ munal rights were as limited as those of the rest of the inhabitants ; the heads of cattle he was en¬ titled to send to pasture on the commons were strictly prescribed. Delisle, in his interesting study of the agricultural classes of Normandy, cites texts which show the limitation of his rights, e. g., the Seigneur de Bricqueville was entitled to send only two oxen and one horse to graze on the meadows. He was so far from being privileged that as La Poix de Fremenvilie, the great feudal jurist, informs us, “The lord who possesses no cattle of his own is not allowed to introduce any strange cattle, whether by letting on lease, selling, or even lending gratis his rights of common.”

Ill

The origin of ecclesiastical property is analo¬ gous to that of seignorial property. In those tur¬ bulent times men fled for protection to the Church no less than to the baron’s castle ; the priestly power, indeed, far outweighed that of the baron ; it was the priest who held the key of paradise.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

97

Men will their goods to the Church on their death beds in theTiope of' securing a seat in para¬ dise ; this custom, which was voluntary at the outset, became so general that it ended by being imposed as an obligation. ‘Wny person dying without leaving a part of his possessions to the Church — which was termed dying deconfes — was debarred from communion and sepulture. If a man died intestate his relations had to appeal to the bishops to appoint arbiters, who conjointly with themselves fixed the amount which the de¬ funct ought to have bequeathed if he had made a testament.”*

The fear of the end of the world in the mil¬ lennium contributed to multiply the donations to the priests and monasteries, for where was the use of keeping one’s lands and chattels, when men and beast were about to perish, and the hour of judgment was at hand? But when the year 1000 had passed away without any sort of cata¬ clysm, people recovered from their fright, and bitterly regretted having parted with their be¬ longings during their lifetime. With a view to intimidating the good people who demanded the restitution of their goods, the Church had re¬ course to anathemas and malisons. The cartu¬ laries of the period abound with formulas of maledictions calculated to strike terror into the hearts of the donator and his relations ; here is a sample of the imprecations which frequently recur in the records of Auvergne. “If a stranger, if any of your relations, if your son or your daughter should be insensate enough to contest

•Montesquieu, “L’Esprit des lois.”

98

FEUDAL PROPERTY

this donation, to lay hands upon the goods dedi¬ cated to God and consecrated to His saints, may they be struck, like Herod, with an awful wound, may they, like Dathan, Abiram, and Judas, who sold the Lord, be tortured in the depths of hell.”*

But the property of the Church was derived, also, from other less turbid sources : men gave away their possessions and even their persons in exchange for her temporal protection. “The major part of the acts of voluntary slavery (ob- noxatio),” says Guerard,+ “were prompted by the spirit of devotion, and by the indulgence practiced by the bishops and abbots towards their serfs, and by the benefits which the law accorded them.” The serfs and vassals of the Church and monas¬ teries enjoyed equal privileges with those belong¬ ing to the king; they were entitled to a threefold compensation in case of injury, damage, or death. The king and the Church undertook to prosecute the culprit, whereas, ordinarily, that was the busi¬ ness of the family of the injured person.

The convents were fortified places able to sus¬ tain regular sieges, and the monks were experts in the use of arms. At Hastings, churchmen fought on both sides ; the Abbey of Hida, a con¬ vent situate in Winchester, had brought Harold a contingent of twelve monks, who all fell fight¬ ing. The high dignitaries of the Church were military chieftains, who laid down their cross and chasuble to grasp a sword and don a cuirass. Many, like the Bishop of Cahors, when they offi-

♦Cited by H. P. Rivi&re in his “Histoire des Institutions de 1’ Auvergne,” 1874.

tB. Gufirard, “Polyptique de l’Abbe Irminon,” section 145.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

99

dated, solemnly deposited on the altar their casque, cuirass, sword, and iron gauntlet. Roland at Roncevalles says to Oliver, in praise of Arch¬ bishop Turpin : —

“Li arceves ques est mult bons chevaliers :

Nen ad meilleur en terre, desuz ciel,

Bien set ferir e de lance e d’espiet.”

In their enthusiasm for his prowess,

“Dient Francais: ‘Ci ad grant vasselage,

En l’arceves que est bien la croce salve,

Kar placet Dieu qu ’assez de tels ait Carles’.”*

During the feudal period the clergy alone possessed instruction ; this, like their weapons, they placed at the service of the parishioners who maintained them. Many a time they interposed between the rural populations and the lords who oppressed them ; just as in Ireland, nowadays, the inferior clergy make common cause against the landlords with the farmers and peasants who pro¬ vide for their subsistence. But if between the rural and urban populations and the priests there sub¬ sisted a close union, the clergy were often at war with the feudal nobility. If in their fits of super¬ stitious terror and feverish piety the barons were capable of stripping themselves of a portion of their lands and riches in favor of the churches and monasteries, in their calmer moments they hankered after the possessions of the monks and

•“A right good cavalier, the Archbishop,

None better on the earth, under the sky;

Expert in fight alike with lance and spear.”

“The French cry out: ‘‘Here be great bravery;

The Cross is in safe keep with the Archbishop ;

Would God that Charles had more knights like to him I”

100

FEUDAL PROPERTY

priests, and seized the first opportunity of secur¬ ing them.

The early kings and military chieftains be¬ stowed churches and monasteries on their liege men and soldiers as rewards ; from the 8th to the 11th centuries a considerable number of churches were in the hands of laymen. The kings of France down to the 18th century had conserved the droit de regale, which entitled them to all the fruits of the vacant bishoprics. When Henry VIII., the Bluebeard of English story and the Supreme Pontiff of England, in order to reform the Church, suppressed not fewer than 645 mon¬ asteries, 90 colleges, 2,374 chantries and free chapels, 100 hospitals, with revenue amounting to two millions per annum, and shared the plun¬ der with his courtiers and concubines, he practiced on a larger scale what all his predecessors had done.

The nobility and clergy, the two classes who during the Middle Ages struggled for supremacy, discharged important and necessary functions ; the tithes and socage-duty they received were the price of the services they rendered.

IV

The feudal burdens outlasted the feudal barons, who vanished when they had grown useless ; these dues became the appanage of nobles, often of middle class origin, who did not render the services of which these dues had been the meed. Violently attacked by the bourgeois writers, and energetically defended by the feudists, they were

FEUDAL PROPERTY

101

definitely suppressed in France by the revolution of 1789. The earlier English revolution which established bourgeois authority, the House of Commons by the side of the House of Lords, has allowed a number of feudal privileges to subsist which are anarchronisms at a time when the aristocratic or landed classes are simply a wing of the “great middle class” in every sense of the word.

The political economists and liberal bourgeois of this century, instead of investigating the origin of feudal obligations, exposing the transforma¬ tions they have undergone, and explaining the necessity thereof, have fancied that they were giving proofs of learning and liberality of spirit by a sweeping condemnation of everything in any way connected with the feudal system. Howbeit, it is imperative for the understanding of the so¬ cial organization of the Middle Ages to ascertain the signification of these obligations, which are the movable form of feudal property. It would be wearisome to pass in review all of the feudal obligations. I will confine myself to those which have more especially roused the ire of the bour¬ geois writers, and try to show that if they were maintained and aggravated by force, they had been, at the origin, freely consented to.

Socage. — We have seen that the feudal baron, when not a military chieftain installed by a con¬ queror, was, as a rule, a simple citizen, a member of the community distinguished by no special privileges from the rest of the villagers, his co- equals ; like these he received his allotment in the partition of the lands, and if his acres were culti-

102

FEUDAL PROPERTY

vated for him by the commoners this was done that he might devote himself exclusively to their defense. Haxthausen has observed that the Rus¬ sian lord continued to receive a quarter or a third of the territory of the mir which was cultivated by the villagers. Latruffe-Montmeylian says that in France the proportion of the communal lands allotted to the lord varied according to the nature of the rights of the inhabitants. It amounted to two-thirds when the peasants’ rights of common extended to the demesne forests, and to a third only when the rights were confined to the com¬ munal forest.* With the increase of the posses¬ sions of the barons and the monks, there followed a lack of serfs to cultivate their lands, wherefore they gave their arable en bordelage to peasant collectivities, “eating from the same pan and off the same loaf,” to use the language of the period.! But, whether freemen or serfs, the tenants owed a certain number of days of work to the feudal lord, to till his field or house his corn.

As, at this period, production of commodities and commerce did not as yet exist, the baron, no less than the peasant, was obliged to produce all that was requisite to supply his wants. In the feudal habitation there existed workshops of

•Latruffe Montmeylian, “Du Droit des Communes sur les biens Communaux.” Paris 1825. Montmeylian is one of the rare French writers who had the courage to defend communal property against the rapacity of the capitalists.

t Bordelage is a feudal system of tenure resembling metayage, inasmuch as the rent for the land is paid not in money, but in a portion of the produce. This tenure has been general in all feudal Europe ; in France it lasted till the Revolution of 1789. Guflrard found it flourishing in the 9th century, on the lands of the Abbey of St. Germain des PrSs. Mr. L. Gomme, in his “Village Com¬ munities,” describes similar peasant associations in England, Scot¬ land, and Ireland.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

103

every description for the manufacture of arms, farming implements, stuffs, clothing, etc., in which the peasants and their wives were bound to work for a certain number of days in the year. The female laborer was under the direction of the lady of the manor herself, and the workshops for the same were termed genicioe. The monasteries likewise possessed workshops for females.* These workshops were rapidly turned into harems for the lords and their retainers, and even into dens of debauchery, in which the barons and the priests debauched their female serfs and vassals. The word geniciaria (woman working in the genicia) became synonymous with prostitute. Our modern brothels, as we see, have a religious and aristro- cratic origin.

In the beginning the number of days of work due to the baron by his vassal was insignificant ; in some places it amounted to three days in the year.t In France, the royal ordinances, in default of a contract or custom, prescribed the number of twelve days. Villein socage was harder ; but the service was not to exceed three days a week, and the serfs had, further, the enjoyment of a small field which the lord had ceded to him and from which he could not be expelled ; he had also a share in the baron’s harvest and a right of pasture in the forest and arable lands. Count Gasparin, who was Minister of Agriculture under Louis XVIII., in his treaty on Fermage, published in

•In the donation made in 728 by Count Eberhard to the monas¬ tery of Merbach, mention is made of 40 workmen employed in the genicte.

t“Let the freeman enjoy liberty and go three times a year into the count’s service,” ordains the Customary of Bigorre.

104

FEUDAL PROPERTY

1821, states his belief in the superiority, as re¬ gards the landed proprietor, of the system of metayage to that of socage. But in the decline of the feudal system the lords abused their power to aggravate socage. “They had usurped such authority,” says Jean Chenu, a writer of the be¬ ginning of the seventeenth century, “that they exacted the labor of tillage, the gathering their grapes and a thousand other services, with no bet¬ ter title than the peasants’ fear of being beaten or eaten up by their men at arms.” When, in the fourteenth century, peace was gradually estab¬ lished in the interior of Europe, every useful func¬ tion had been taken away from the feudal baron ; and the nobles who succeeded the barons became parasites and tyrants.

Bans de moisson. — It has been supposed that the lord’s right of prescribing the days on which to mow the fields, gather the grapes, reap the corn, etc., was a purely feudal one, whereas its origin is traceable to the period in which collective property obtained. We have seen above that in order to allow the arable lands to remain open to the cattle of the village, the elders fixed the days for the various harvests. This usage, established, in the interests of the villagers, could only be diverted from its true ends when the lord began to traffic with his crops. He substituted his own authority for that of the council of the elders, or influenced their decisions so as to retard the proclamation of the ban des moissons and be be¬ forehand with his own crops, and able, conse¬ quently, to sell them earlier and on better terms than the produce of the communal fields.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

105

Banalite.* — The term is feudal; but the cus¬ tom which it designates is a communistic one. In the village collectivities, certain offices, as afore shown, were filled by individuals maintained at the expense of the commune ; there was the village herdsman, who drove the cattle to pasture ; there were common forges, mills, slaughter-houses, and animals to breed from, at the disposal of the com¬ munity. Private families, instead of baking their own bread, sent it to be baked in the communal oven ; a custom introduced from the economical consideration of reducing the consumption of fuel. The charge of watching over and attending to these ovens was entrusted to the council of elders ; thereafter to the lord, who, whenever it was in his interest to do so, substituted his own authority for that of the men commissioned by the commune. A small tax was levied for this right of usage of the common objects; in an ordinance of 1223, of Guillaume Blanchemain, Archbishop of Reims, it is said that “the prelate shall be the proprietor of the common oven and be entitled to the tribute of a loaf for every batch of thirty-two loaves.” Boucher d’Argis cites decrees of 1563 and 1673 fixing the right of grinding in the common mills at a 16th and a 13th ; it is computed that, at present, the miller deducts more than a tenth.t

This sort of institutions could exist only in the absence of the production of commodities; they hampered commerce and stood in the way of

•Boucher d’Argis. Code rural. Ch. xv. Des banalltfs.

tThe term signifies the compulsory usage of a thing belonging tc the lord on condition of a due.

106

FEUDAL PROPERTY

private enterprises ; the revolutionary bourgeois of France pronounced them tainted with feudal¬ ism, and abolished them in 1790.

The CHURCH, which eventually became the exclusive property of the clergy, and is now closed to the public out of the hours of worship, was previously the joint property of the curate, the baron, and the peasants. The chancel and altar belonged to the lord and curate ; they were bound to repair the woodwork, flooring, seats, etc., but the nave belonged to the peasants, who used it for their markets, communal assemblies, and dancing parties, or as a storehouse for their crops in case of need.* Mr. Thorold Rogers says that in all cases the Church was the common hall of the parish, and a fortress in time of danger, oc¬ cupying the site of the stockade which had been built when the first settlers occupied the ground.t The church bells, likewise, belonged to the peas¬ ants, who set them pealing to announce their assemblies, or to apprise the villagers of fires or hostile attacks. In the judicial archives of the French provinces of the 17th and 18th centuries, we find frequent mention of judgments rendered against the bells for having warned the peasants of the arrival of the collectors of the salt-tax ; they were sentenced to be taken down and whip¬ ped by the hands of the executioner, “notwith-

•A synodical statute of 1529 prohibits — “To hold or suffer in the church or cemeteries here any festivals, dances, games, merry¬ makings, representations, markets, and other illicit assemblies ; for the church is ordained solely to serve the Lord, and not for such¬ like follies.” The naive believers of the Middle Ages saw no harm in dancing, and representing their mysteries, in the honse of the Lord.

tThorold Rogers, “Economical Interpretation of History.”

FEUDAL PROPERTY

107

standing that they had been consecrated and blessed by a most solemn ceremony, in which the oil of St. Chrism and myrrh and incense had been used and many prayers recited.” The Church was the house of God, elevated in the face of the feudal manor, and the feudal peasants gathered together under the shadow of it as around a strong and tender mother.

The Tithe raised on the harvests of the peas¬ ants and the nobles in favor of the Church, was, in the beginning, optional; just as it is in Ireland at the present hour ; it was paid alike to the priest and sorcerer. Agobard, an archbishop of the 9th century, complains that the ecclesiastical tithe is paid with far less regularity than that accorded to the tempestarii, men endowed with the power to lay storms and conjure up foul weather. But from being optional the tithes became compulsory in virtue of the feudal adage, “no land without its tithes and burdens they were converted into a seignorial right, and accorded to lay lords and abbots, who re-sold them to other laymen. Dis¬ cretionary at the outset, the tithes became obliga¬ tory ; and, in the sequel, constituted an oppressive impost that no performance of services any longer authorized: even so is refined gold transmuted into vile copper!

V

Just as the seignorial obligations, which became onerous and iniquitious when the feudal barons had ceased to afford protection to their vassals, tenants, and serfs, had at one time been volun-

108

FEUDAL PROPERTY

tarily acquiesced in ; in like manner, the landed property of the nobles, — at first a military post, entrusted temporarily to a warrior, or, simply a right to a share in the agrarian divisions, — grew and expanded by dint of fraud and violence, and generally at the expense of the communal lands.

Marx, in his admirable 27th chapter of “Capi¬ tal,” “on the expropriation of the agricultural population from the land,” to which I refer the reader, has described the prompt and brutal fashion in which the Scotch and English lords stole the possessions of the yeomen. “The great encroachers,” as Harrison, the editor of “Holin- shed’s Chronicle,” calls them, went to work ex¬ peditiously. In the 15th century the immense majority of the population consisted of peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden. Macau¬ lay calculates that “the number of proprietors was not less than 160,000, who, with their families, must have made up more than one-seventh of the whole nation. The average income of these small landlords was estimated at between £60 and £70 a year.”

The chief period of eviction began with the 16th century. The great feudal lords drove the peasantry by force from the land, to which they had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and seized upon the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufacture, and the corre¬ sponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave a direct impulse to these evictions. The sheep drove out the men. “The shepe that were wont to be so meke and tame,” says Thomas

FEUDAL PROPERTY

109

More, “and so small eaters, now, as I heare say, be become so great devourers and so wylde, that they eate up and swallow downe the very men themselves.”*

In the last decade of the 17th century, the yeo¬ manry, the class of independent peasants, were more numerous than the clan of farmers. They had formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength, and, even according to the confession of Macaulay, stood in favorable contrast to the drunken squires and to their servants, the county clergy, who had to marry their masters’ cast-off mistresses. About 1750 the yeomanry had disappeared, and so had in the last decade of the 18th century the last trace of the common land of the agricultural laborer. In the 19th century the very memory of the connection between the agricultural laborer and the communal property has, of course, van¬ ished in England. The agricultural population has received not a farthing of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which, be¬ tween 1800 and 1831 were stolen from them by parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the landlords.

The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called clearing of estates, i. e., the sweeping men off them. But what “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland. There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (in

•“Utopia, 9t translated by Robinson. Ed. Arber, London, 1869.

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FEUDAL PROPERTY

Ireland, landlords have gone to the length of sweeping away several villages at once ; in Scot¬ land areas as large as German principalities are dealt with), finally by the peculiar form of prop¬ erty under which the embezzled lands were held.

The Highland Celts were organized in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the English Government succeeded in suppress¬ ing the intestine wars of these “great men,” and their constant incursions into the lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their time-honored trade as robbers ; they only changed its form. On their own authority they trans¬ formed their nominal right into a right of private property, and as this brought them into collision with their clansmen, they resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king of England might as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman. This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the fol¬ lowers of the Pretender, can be followed through its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steu- art and James Anderson. As an example of the method obtaining in the 19th century, the “clear¬ ing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well instructed in ecorn omy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of a like kind, reduced to 15,000,

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into a sheep walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced the eviction, and came to blows with the inhabit¬ ants. One’ old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabit¬ ants about 6,000 acres on the sea shore — two acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s 6d per acre to the clansmen who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clan-land she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 121,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the sea shore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English au¬ thor says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.

The plunder of the State lands on a large scale began with William of Orange. “These estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure. All this happened without the slightest observa¬ tion of legal etiquette. The crown lands thus

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FEUDAL PROPERTY

fraudulently appropriated, together with the rob¬ bery of the Church estates, as far as these had not been lost again during the Republican Revo¬ lution, form the basis of the today princely do¬ mains of the English oligarchy. The bourgeois capitalists favored the operation with the view, among others, to promoting free trade in land, extending the domain of modern agriculture on the large farm system, and to increasing their supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready to hand.”

After the restoration of the Stuarts the landed proprietors had carried by legal means an act of usurpation, effected everywhere on the Con¬ tinent without any legal formality. In 1660 a House of Commons, in which the landlords were supreme, relieved their estates of all feudal dues, then amounting to about one-half of the entire revenues of the State. Military service, purvey¬ ance, aids, reliefs, premier seisin, wardship, alienation, escheat, all disappeared in a day. In their places were substituted excise duties. By 12 Charles II., c. 23 the great bulk of taxation was for the first time transferred from the land to the people, who have borne it ever since.

Landed property monopolized by the lords was exempted from all dues towards the State, as the lord had been discharged from all obliga¬ tions towards his vassals and tenants ; feudal property had been changed into capitalist prop¬ erty.

This transformation was accomplished in Great Britain in the midst of the most awful misery of the peasant class ; the cultivators were ex-.

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pelled from the land by wholesale and made beg¬ gars. Their numbers became a social danger against which the most barbarious measures were taken. Legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own will to go on working under the old condi¬ tions that no longer existed. In England this legislation began under Henry VII.

Henry VIII., 1530: — “Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s license. On the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to a cart tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then to swear an oath to go back to their bithplace, or to where they have lived the last three years, and to put themselves to labor.” What a grim irony! In 27 Henry VIII. the for¬ mer statute is repeated, but strengthened with new clauses. For the second arrest for vaga¬ bondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off, but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the commonweal.”

Elizabeth, 1572: — Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless someone will take them into service for two years ; in case of a repetition of the offense, if they are over 18 they are to be executed, unless someone will take them into service for two years ; but for the third of¬ fense they are to be executed without mercy as felons. Similar statutes, 18 Elizabeth, c. 13, and another of 1597, James 1 : — Anyone wandering about and begging is declared a rogue and a

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FEUDAL PROPERTY

vagabond. Justices of the Peace in petty ses¬ sions are authorized to have them publicly whipped, and for the first offence to imprison them for six months, for the second two years. Whilst in prison they are to be whipped as much and as often as the Justices of the Peace think fit. Incorrigible and dangerous rogues are to be branded with an “R” on the left shoulder and set to hard labor, and if they are caught begging again, to be executed without mercy. — These statutes, legally binding until the beginning of the 18th century, were only repealed by 12 Ann, c. 23.

Albeit not a single nation in Europe can boast of having raised an aristocracy that accomplished its work of monopolizing the land with anything like the rapacity and ferociousness of Scotch and English landlords, nevertheless in all countries the peasant class has been in great part despoiled of its territorial possessions ; and no means have been left untried to bring about that most lauda¬ ble and lucrative consummation. Let me enu¬ merate a few of the devices that were resorted to in France.

The feudal obligations, aids, and fines became so excessive that the peasants commuted for them by ceding to the lords a portion of the com¬ mon lands. These cessions of territory, greedily hungered after by the feudal lords, would appear, well-nigh all of them, to have been obtained by the aid of artifice; the nobles corrupted a cer¬ tain number of villagers who managed to con¬ stitute in their own persons the general assembly of the commune that voted the cessions ; hence

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we come across royal ordinances in France which specify that for a cession of territory to be valid it must be voted in an assembly of all of the in¬ habitants of the Commune.

The robbers of the communal lands did not invariably employ Jesuitical means; they often plundered with open brutality. In the 16th cen¬ tury, a period when the industrial and commer¬ cial bourgeoisie were rapidly developing, the communal lands were coveted at one and the same time by the nobles and by the bourgeois speculators. The towns were enlarged to meet the new requirements, and agriculture increased its yield. The development of agriculture was the great object of the speculators; under the pretext of giving increased extension to the arable lands, they induced the King to grant them, by royal edict, the right of bringing under culture the waste lands ; they hastened to include in the category of waste lands the communal ter¬ ritories, and' proceeded to wrest them from the peasants, who took up arms in their defense ; and to vanquish whose resistance the speculators were compelled to appeal for aid to the armed force of the State.

The nobles had recourse to chicanery in order to win possession of the village territories ; they pretended that the lands owned by the peasants did not correspond with their title deeds, which was perfectly true ; they insisted on the verifica¬ tion of their claims, and confiscated what was held by imperfect titles for their own benefit. Upon occasion they proceeded- after a revolu¬ tionary fashion ; they destroyed* the title-deeds

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FEUDAL PROPERTY

which they had got hold of, and so disabled the peasants from establishing their rights to the fields now left without an owner; whereupon in virtue of the feudal adage, “pas de terre sans seigneur ” the nobles seized upon the peasants’ territory. The autos da fe of proprietary titles, held by the peasants during the revolution of 1789, were in retaliation of the suppression of the peasant titles perpetrated by the nobility of the 16th century.

The forests were grabbed up more brutally: eschewing all legal formalities, the lords ad¬ judged to themselves the ownership of the woods and underwood; they enclosed the forests and forbade hunting, and abolished the right of estovers ; the right of taking wood for fuel and for the repairs of houses, fences, implements, etc. These encroachments of the nobles on the forest-lands, which were the common property of the village, gave rise to terrible revolts of the peasants. The jacqueries * which broke out in the middle of the 14th century in the provinces of the North and the center of France, were, in fact, occasioned by the pretensions of the nobles to forbid hunting and to interfere with the rights of common in the forests, and the enjovment of the rivers. Similar conflicts arose in Germany, such as the famous revolt of the Saxons against the Emperor Henry II., and that of the Suabian peasants, who, in the time of Luther, took up arms against the lords who debarred them from the enjoyment of the forests. These peasant in-

•Jacqueries were Insurrections of the peasants ; a term deriTed from the insulting epithet of Jacques Bonhomme applied to the peasants by the nobles.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

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surrections compelled the lords on several occa¬ sions to respect the ancient rights of common which consisted in the right — limited only by the peasant’s wants — to take wood and brushwood for hedging, firing, and repairing his implements (hedge-bote, fire-bote, and plough-bote) ; and in the right of common pasture, or the right to send his cows, horses, swine, and in some cases his goats, to graze on the commons throughout the year, the month of May alone excepted. So firmly rooted were these rights that Lapoix de Freminville declared, in 1760, that even in the event of their abuse by the peasants they could not be taken away from them: “for the right of usage is perpetual, and being so, it is accorded alike to the actual inhabitants and to those who may come after them ; one cannot strip of an acquired right even those who are yet unborn.” But the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1789 felt none of the feudal legist’s respect for the peas¬ ants’ rights, and abolished them for the benefit of the landed proprietor.

If the lords did, as a matter of fact, occasion¬ ally bow to the peasants’ rights of common, they nevertheless constantly declared that these were enjoyed on sufferance only; for they looked upon themselves as the proprietors of the forests; just as in later times they came to pretend to the ownership of the vassals’ lands. In the Middle Ages, when a free man, an alodial proprietor, commended himself to a lord, sought the pro¬ tection, that is to say, of a powerful person, he presented him with a clod of turf, and vowed fealty and homage to him; yet he remained the

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FEUDAL PROPERTY

master of his field. But in a number of provinces, e. g., in Brittany, the lord considered himself as the owner of the subsoil, while he recognized the peasants’ rights to the superficies, i. e., the crops, trees, buildings, etc. It is in virtue of such legal fictions that during the bourgeois period the nobles expropriated the peasants, de¬ scendants from the vassals, their ancestors. In Scotland, the robbery of the peasant property was perpetrated with such undisguised brutality as to arouse the public indignation. Karl Marx, in “Capital,” has related how the pious Duchess of Sutherland dispossessed the peasants whose fathers had built up the glory and the grandeur of her house.

Until the bourgeois revolution of 1789 had established private property in land, the landed estates in France, including those of the nobility, were subjected to rights of common, which periodically took from them the character of pri¬ vate property. Once the harvest was secured, the forests and arable land appropriated by the nobility became common property again, and the peasants were free to turn their cattle on them. The vines were liable to a similar usage. Fran¬ cois de Neufchateau, in his “Agronomical Voy¬ age,” 1806, cites a Memoire, published in 1763, by Societe d’ Economie Rurale en Berne, in which it is complained that “after the vintage the vine¬ yards are laid open to the sheep, who grass there *s on common lands.” But not only were the landlords bound to permit the pasturing on their lands of the village cattle ; they were moreover forbidden to cultivate the soil according to their

FEUDAL PROPERTY

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own methods ; they were constrained to conform to the council of the elders, and required per¬ mission for the planting of their vines. A per¬ mission of this kind was refused a few years be¬ fore the French Revolution to Montesquieu, greatly to the scandal of the political economists. The proprietor was not allowed to leave his lands uncultivated ; for a royal ordinance of Louis XIV., enacted in 1693, and which but consecrated an ancient usage, authorizes, — in the event of the owner not cultivating his land himself, — “any person to sow the same and to gather the fruits/’ Landed property, under the feudal system, was anything but free ; not only was it burdened with obligations, but it belonged to the family collec¬ tively ; the owner could not dispose of it at pleas¬ ure ; he was only the usufructuary possessor whose mission it was to transmit his estates to his descendants. The Church estates, likewise, bore this character; they were the property of the Church, the great Catholic family; the abbots, monks, and priests who occupied the lands were merely the administrators — the very faithless ad¬ ministrators — of them. In order to claim immun¬ ity from impositions, the French clergy, down to the time of the Revolution, pretended that ecclesi¬ astical possessions ought not to be considered as ordinary property ; that it was nobody’s property ( res nullius), because it was sacred, religious property (res sacrae, res religiosae) . The revo¬ lutionary bourgeois took them at their word ; they declared that the clergy were not the pro¬ prietors of the ecclesiastical estates, which be¬ longed to the Church. Now, the Greek word

120

FEUDAL PROPERTY

ecclesia, whence is derived eglise (church), sig¬ nifies the assembly, the reunion of all the faith¬ ful, which is the nation at large; wherefore the estates of the Church are national property. By the help of such subterfuge did the revolutionary bourgeois, like Henry VIII. of England, lay hands upon the Church property and distribute amongst themselves the estates which belonged to the poor.

It is these obligations of feudal property which the political economists and Liberal historians attack with special virulence; obligations which were vestiges of the primitive communism that secured a measure of well-being to the peasants, and which they forfeited as soon as private prop¬ erty had superseded feudal property.

The bourgeois historians have invented the legend of the Revolution of 1789 bestowing the land upon the peasant, and freedom and happi¬ ness therewithal; whereas the plain truth is that the great Revolution stripped him of his rights of common and other secular rights of equal im¬ portance, delivering him up, defenseless, into the clutches of the usurers and middlemen ; loading him with taxes and forcing him to enter into competition with the great landed proprietor, equipped with capital and machinery. The great bourgeois revolution was fraught with misery and ruin for the peasant. According to the of¬ ficial census, there were, in 1857, 7,846,000 landed proprietors in France ; out of these 3,600,- 000 were so poor that they paid no direct con¬ tributions ; the number of proprietors, great or small, was consequently reduced to 4,246,000. In

FEUDAL PROPERTY

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1879 the various questions were ventilated of an agricultural credit, of the application to the land¬ lords of the law of bankruptcy, of the simplifica¬ tion of the law of procedure in expropriations ; and an inquiry was instituted to determine the number of landed proprietors entitled to a share in the famous credit. La Republiaite Francaise, conducted by Gambetta, much interested in the question, stated in its issue of 25th August, 1879, that there existed in France only 2,826,000 landed proprietors, offering the necessary guarantees en¬ titling them to a share in the credit. Thus from 1851 to 1879 the number of landed proprietors deserving of the name had dwindled to 1,420,000.

To dissipate the errors and falsehoods which the bourgeois writers have propagated respecting the status of the cultivator during the Feudal Period, and the benefits accruing to him from the Revolution,, it suffices to compare the condi¬ tions of labor of the mediaeval cultivator with those of the modern agricultural laborer. The researches made by men of learning, during the last 50 years, and the numerous documents dis¬ covered in different town and convents, enable us to institute such a comparison.

L. Delisle, in his afore-cited study of the con¬ dition of the laboring classes in Normandy, points out how the lord shared the fortune of the laborer; for the rent was based upon the har¬ vest. For instance, the tenants of the monks of St. Julien de Tours contributed the sixth sheaf; in other parts the tenant contributed the tenth sheaf; in still others the twelfth. Now, we may rummage the bourgeois world and shall not

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FEUDAL PROPERTY

find a landlord contenting himself with a twelfth or even a sixth of the crops gathered on his es¬ tate. These conditions were not confined to a single province, for in the south of France, at Moissac, we meet with identical ones. Enact¬ ments of 1212 and 1214 show us the monks of the Abbey of Moissac receiving only a third, a fourth, or ew n as little as a tenth of the crops harvested by the peasants who tilled their lands. Lagreze-Fossat, who has studied these enact¬ ments, remarks that “a mutual agreement was come to between the peasants and the monks, and the contribution of the produce demanded by the latter does not bear the character of an impost ; it was debated beforehand, and freely consented to.”*

In the 11th and 12th centuries, when the vine was cultivated in Normandy, the landlords claimed only one-half of the crops; the other half belonged to the cultivators. Nowadays, in the vine-growing countries, the peasant rarely tastes the wine he produces.

Guerard has discovered and published the ac¬ count-book of the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres ; that precious document, which dates from the time of Charlemagne, enables us to study the lives of the serfs and peasants of the 9th century. . The abbey lands were cultivated, not by individuals, but by collectivities of peasants, composed of from 20 to 30 adult persons living together, and the dues paid by them would ap-

*A. LagrSze Fossat, “Etudes Historiques sur Moissac ” 1872. Moissac is a small town in the Department of Tam et Garonne of considerable importance in the Middle Ages.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

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pear ridiculously small to a modern farmer.

The abbey lands were divided into three cate¬ gories, the manses ingenuiles, the manses lidiles, the manses serviles. At that period certain quali¬ ties were inherent in the land ; it was seignorial, free, or servile ; Guerard calculates