Part 8 (1/2)

23. O. Miller and M. Kovalevsky, ”In the Mountaineer Communities of Kabardia,” in Vestnik Evropy, April, 1884. With the Shakhsevens of the Mugan Steppe, blood feuds always end by marriage between the two hostile sides (Markoff, in appendix to the Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Soc.

xiv. 1, 21).

24. Post, in Afrik. Jurisprudenz, gives a series of facts ill.u.s.trating the conceptions of equity inrooted among the African barbarians. The same may be said of all serious examinations into barbarian common law.

25. See the excellent chapter, ”Le droit de La Vieille Irlande,” (also ”Le Haut Nord”) in Etudes de droit international et de droit politique, by Prof. E. Nys, Bruxelles, 1896.

26. Introduction, p. x.x.xv.

27. Das alte Wallis, pp. 343-350.

28. Maynoff, ”Sketches of the Judicial Practices of the Mordovians,” in the ethnographical Zapiski of the Russian Geographical Society, 1885, pp. 236, 257.

29. Henry Maine, International Law, London, 1888, pp. 11-13. E. Nys, Les origines du droit international, Bruxelles, 1894.

30. A Russian historian, the Kazan Professor Schapoff, who was exiled in 1862 to Siberia, has given a good description of their inst.i.tutions in the Izvestia of the East-Siberian Geographical Society, vol. v. 1874.

31. Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities, New York, 1876, pp. 193-196.

32. Nazaroff, The North Usuri Territory (Russian), St. Petersburg, 1887, p. 65.

33. Hanoteau et Letourneux, La Kabylie, 3 vols. Paris, 1883.

34. To convoke an ”aid” or ”bee,” some kind of meal must be offered to the community. I am told by a Caucasian friend that in Georgia, when the poor man wants an ”aid,” he borrows from the rich man a sheep or two to prepare the meal, and the community bring, in addition to their work, so many provisions that he may repay the debt. A similar habit exists with the Mordovians.

35. Hanoteau et Letourneux, La kabylie, ii. 58. The same respect to strangers is the rule with the Mongols. The Mongol who has refused his roof to a stranger pays the full blood-compensation if the stranger has suffered therefrom (Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. 231).

36. N. Khoudadoff, ”Notes on the Khevsoures,” in Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Society, xiv. 1, Tiflis, 1890, p. 68. They also took the oath of not marrying girls from their own union, thus displaying a remarkable return to the old gentile rules.

37. Dm. Bakradze, ”Notes on the Zakataly District,” in same Zapiski, xiv. 1, p. 264. The ”joint team” is as common among the Lezghines as it is among the Ossetes.

38. See Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Oldenburg, 1887. Munzinger, Ueber das Recht und Sitten der Bogos, Winterthur 1859; Casalis, Les Ba.s.soutos, Paris, 1859; Maclean, Kafir Laws and Customs, Mount c.o.ke, 1858, etc.

39. Waitz, iii. 423 seq.

40. Post's Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Familien Rechts Oldenburg, 1889, pp. 270 seq.

41. Powell, Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnography, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1881, quoted in Post's Studien, p. 290; Bastian's Inselgruppen in Oceanien, 1883, p. 88.

42. De Stuers, quoted by Waitz, v. 141.

CHAPTER V

MUTUAL AID IN THE MEDIAEVAL CITY

Growth of authority in Barbarian Society. Serfdom in the villages.

Revolt of fortified towns: their liberation; their charts. The guild.

Double origin of the free medieval city. Self-jurisdiction, self-administration. Honourable position of labour. Trade by the guild and by the city.

Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence. On the contrary, modern research, as we saw it in the two preceding chapters, proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by wors.h.i.+p of common ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle--the village community--was called into existence by the social genius of man. This inst.i.tution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further develop their social inst.i.tutions and to pa.s.s through some of the darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into loose aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step in their evolution, and to work out a number of secondary social inst.i.tutions, several of which have survived down to the present time.

We have now to follow the further developments of the same ever-living tendency for mutual aid. Taking the village communities of the so-called barbarians at a time when they were making a new start of civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have to study the new aspects taken by the sociable wants of the ma.s.ses in the middle ages, and especially in the medieval guilds and the medieval city.

Far from being the fighting animals they have often been compared to, the barbarians of the first centuries of our era (like so many Mongolians, Africans, Arabs, and so on, who still continue in the same barbarian stage) invariably preferred peace to war. With the exception of a few tribes which had been driven during the great migrations into unproductive deserts or highlands, and were thus compelled periodically to prey upon their better-favoured neighbours--apart from these, the great bulk of the Teutons, the Saxons, the Celts, the Slavonians, and so on, very soon after they had settled in their newly-conquered abodes, reverted to the spade or to their herds. The earliest barbarian codes already represent to us societies composed of peaceful agricultural communities, not hordes of men at war with each other. These barbarians covered the country with villages and farmhouses;(1) they cleared the forests, bridged the torrents, and colonized the formerly quite uninhabited wilderness; and they left the uncertain warlike pursuits to brotherhoods, scholae, or ”trusts” of unruly men, gathered round temporary chieftains, who wandered about, offering their adventurous spirit, their arms, and their knowledge of warfare for the protection of populations, only too anxious to be left in peace. The warrior bands came and went, prosecuting their family feuds; but the great ma.s.s continued to till the soil, taking but little notice of their would-be rulers, so long as they did not interfere with the independence of their village communities.(2) The new occupiers of Europe evolved the systems of land tenure and soil culture which are still in force with hundreds of millions of men; they worked out their systems of compensation for wrongs, instead of the old tribal blood-revenge; they learned the first rudiments of industry; and while they fortified their villages with palisaded walls, or erected towers and earthen forts whereto to repair in case of a new invasion, they soon abandoned the task of defending these towers and forts to those who made of war a speciality.