VILLAFRANCA 219 VILLAGE COMMUNITY revolutionary troubles, definitely espous- ing the cause of Carranza, when the lat- ter began his campaign against Presi- dent Huerta of the Republic, the slayer of the previous President, Francisco Madero. Carranza made Villa leader of the army advancing against Mexico City. The main resistance of the Huerta par- tisans was made at Torreon, where Villa, leading a much inferior force, distin- guished himself by his brilliant and dar- ing tactics, exciting the admiration of military strategists in all parts of the world. After his success and elevation to the Presidency, however, Carranza disagreed with Villa, denouncing him as a bandit, whei'eupon the latter de- clared war against the Carranza govern- ment and returned to his guerrilla tactics in the mountains. To create difficult relations between Carranza and the Governm-ent of the United States, Villa and his followers, early in 1916, crossed the international boundary and attacked the town of Columbus, N. M., killing a number of citizens and setting fire to a number of houses. The United States immediately despatched a large cavalry force across the frontier in pur- suit of Villa and his band, which achieved no success, but brought about a very critical situation between the two countries. In 1920 Villa was pardoned by the new revolutionary government and granted a farm as a subsidy. VILLAFRANCA, a town of Italy, in the province of Verona, on the Tartaro. [t is celebrated as having been the cen- ter of the wars of 1848 and 1866. The preliminaries of peace between Napoleon III. and the Emperor of Austria were signed here, July 11, 1859. Pop. about 12,000. VILLAGE COMMUNITY, the means by which many scholars contend that great part of Europe must have been brought into cultivation. A clan of set- tlers took a tract of land, built their huts thereon, and laid out common fields, which they cultivated in common as one family. The land was divided out every few years into family lots, but the whole continued to be cultivated by the com- munity subject to the established customs as interpreted in the village council by the sense of the village elders. This may still be seen in the villages of Russia, and even in some parts of England may still be traced the ancient boundaries of the great common field, divided length- wise into three strops (one fallow, the two others in different kinds of crop), and again crosswise into lots held by the villagers. This theory, often called the mark system, was started by Von Maurer in Germany, but mainly owes its cur- rency to Sir Henry Maine, who in his work entitled "Village Communities in the East and West" (1871) pointed out close parallels in the archaic land com- munities in India. The first serious at- tack upon the theory v/as made by F. Seebohm, in his work "The English Vil- lage Community Examined" (1883; 4th ed. 1890), which labors to prove that the ancient village community was not or- iginally free, but traces back to the Roman manorial system of a community in serfdom under a manor with its lord. Fustel de Coulanges dealt Von Maurer's theory a still more deadly blow by turn- ing against him the evidence of the Leges Barbarorum and early chartu- laries on which his ai'gument mainly re- lied. He proves also that the Russian m?V does not represent agrarian com- munism, the soil belonging not to it but to some one else, and the peasants merely paying rent collectively as weU as cul- tivating the land collectively. I'he prim- itive mark, the association of the mark (Markgenossenschaft), the original com- mon land (Gemeinland or Allmende) — all the evidence for these he weighs and finds wanting, contending that the whole imposing structure of argument has been erected out of a series of misunder- standings, national communism having been confused with the common owner- ship of the family, tenure in common with ownership in common, agrarian communism with village commons. Mr. Gomme considers Lauder and Kells as surviving types of the tribal community in its most primitive form; besides the example of Hitchin, from which Mr. Seebohm started working back, he examines the cases of Aston village, in the parish of Bampton, Ox- fordshire, Chippenham in Wiltshire, Mal- mesbury, and others, his conclusion be- ing that the village community is no modern institution, but one beginning far back in the history of human civil- ization, and probably a phase through which all peoples have passed. In the hill cultivation and settlement, of which many traces remain, he sees evidence of pre-Aryan influence analogous to similar customs surviving in India. The com- munity in its tribal form was the prom- inent feature, the village of serfs the subordinate; groups of kindred occupy- ing their several homesteads and the lands around; small villages of serfs occupying cottage homes, massed to- gether, and using the lands around them in intermixed or runrig occupation. Thus Mr. Seebohm's formula, defining the English institution as a manor with a village community in serfdom under it, he would rewrite as a tribal community with a village in serfdom under it.
