equal rank and claimed equal shares, although formerly some of the portions had been distributed equally only between the grandfathers or their offspring (stirps). The right to claim redivision held good only within the circle of second cousins. Members of the kindred who stood further than that from each other, that is, third cousins, were not entitled to reallotment on the strength of daddenhud.
Another fact which is brought out with complete evidence by the Welsh Surveys is that the tenure is ascribed to communities of kinsmen and not to chiefs or headmen. The latter certainly existed and had exerted a powerful influence on the disposal of common land as well as on government and justice. But in the view of 14th-century surveys each township is owned not by this or the other elder, but by numerous bodies of coparceners. The gavell of Owen Gogh, for instance, contained twenty-six coparceners. In this way there is a clear attribution of rights of communal ownership, if we like to use the term, and not merely of rights of maintenance. Nor is there any warrant for a construction of these arrangements on a supposed patriarchal system.
Let us now compare this description of Celtic tribal tenure with Slavonic institutions. The most striking modern examples of tribal communities settled on a territorial basis are presented by the history of the Southern Slavs in the Balkan Peninsula and in Austria, of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgarians, but it is easy to trace customs of the same kind in the memories of Western Slavs conquered by Germans, of the Poles and of the different subdivisions of the Russians. A good clue to the subject is provided by a Serb proverb which says that a man by himself is bound to be a martyr. One might almost suggest that these popular customs illustrate the Aristotelian conception of the single man seeking the “autarkeia,” a complete and self-sufficient existence in the society of his fellow-men, and arriving at the stage of the tribal village, the γένος, which is also a κώμη, as described in the famous introductory chapter of the Greek philosopher's Politics. The Slavs of the mountainous regions of the Balkans and of the Alps in their stubborn struggle with nature and with human enemies have clustered and still cluster to some extent (e.g. in Montenegro) in closely united and widely spreading brotherhoods (bratstva) and tribes (plemena). Some of these brotherhoods derive their names from a real or supposed common ancestor, and are composed of relatives as well as of affiliated strangers. They number sometimes hundreds of members,[1] of guns, as the fighting males are characteristically called. Such are—the Vukotići, Kovacevići, as one might say in Old English—the Vukotings or Kovachevings, of Montenegro. The dwellings, fields, and pasturages of these brotherhoods or kindreds are scattered over the country, and it is not always possible to trace them in compact divisions on the map. But there was the closest union in war, revenge, funeral rites, marriage arrangements, provision for the poor and for those who stand in need of special help, as, for instance, in case of fires, inundations and the like. And corresponding to this union there existed a strong feeling of unity in regard to property, especially property in land. Although ownership was divided among the different families, a kind of superior or eminent domain stretched over the whole of the bratstvo, and was expressed in the participation in common in pasture and wood, in the right to control alienations of land and to exercise pre-emption. If any of the members of the brotherhood wanted to get rid of his share he had to apply first to his next of kin within the family and then to the further kinsmen of the bratstvo.
As the Welsh kindred (progenies) were subdivided into gavells formed of extended family communities, even so the Bosnian, Montenegrin, Servian, Slovene tribes fell into house communities, Kućas, Zadrugas, which were built up on the principle of keeping blood-relatives and their property together as long as possible. They consisted generally of some 15 to 20 grown-up persons, some 6 or 7 first and second cousins with their wives and children, living in a hamlet around the central house of the domaćin, the house leader. In some instances the number of coparceners increased to 50 or even to 70. The members of the united house community, which in fact is a small village or hamlet, joined in meals and work. Their rights in the undivided household of the hamlet were apportioned according to the pedigree, i.e. this apportionment took account first of the stirpes or extant descendants of former scions of the family, so that, say, the offspring of each of two grandfathers who had been brothers were considered as equal sharers although the stirps, the stock, of one was represented only by one person, while the stirps of the other had grown to consist of two uncles and of three nephews all alive. There was no resettlement of shares, as in the case of Wales, but the life of the house community while it existed unbroken led to work in common, the contributions to which are regulated by common consent and supervised by the leader. Grounds, houses, implements of agriculture (ploughs, oxen, carts) and of viticulture—casks, cauldrons for the making of brandy, &c., are considered to be common capital and ought not to be sold unless by common consent. Divisions were not prohibited. Naturally a family had to divide sooner or later, and the shares have to be made real, to be converted into fields and vineyards. But this was an event which marks, as it were, the close of the regular existence of one union and the birth of similar unions derived from it. As a rule, the kuća kept together as long as it could, because co-operation was needed and isolation dangerous—for economic considerations as well as for the sake of defence.
Attention, however, should be called more particularly to the parallel phenomena in the social history of the Russians, where the conditions seem to stand out in specially strong contrast with those prevailing among the mountain Slavs of the Balkans and of the Alps. In the enormous extent of Russia we have to reckon with widely different geographical and racial areas, among other, with the Steppe settlements of the so-called Little Russians in the Ukraina and the forest settlements of the Great Russians in the north. In spite of great divergences the economic history of all these branches of Slavonic stock gravitates towards one main type, viz. towards rural unions of kinsmen, on the basis of enlarged households. In the south the typical village settlement is the dvorišće, the big court or hamlet consisting of some four to eight related families holding together; in the north it is the pećišće, the big oven, a hamlet of somewhat smaller size in which three to five families are closely united for purposes of common husbandry.
It is interesting to notice that even the break-up of the joint household does not lead to an entire severance of the ties between its members. They mostly continue in another form, viz. in the shape of an open-field system with intermixture of strips, compulsory rotation of crops, commons of pasture, of wood, sometimes shifting allotments as regards meadows. There is, e.g. an act of division between six brothers from the north of Russia of the year 1640. They agree to divide bread and salt, house and liberties, money, cloth and stores of all kinds and to settle apart. As to arable, Shumila is to take the upper strip in the field by the settlement, and next to him Tretjak, then Maxim, then Zaviala, then Shestoy, then Luke. In the big harvest furlong likewise, and in the small likewise, and by the meadow likewise and so on through all the furlongs. So that in this case and in innumerable other cases of the same kind the open-field system with its inconvenient intermixture of plots and limited power of every husbandman to manage his land appears as a direct continuation of the joint tribal households.
Another fact to be noticed is the tendency to form artificial associations on the pattern of the prevailing unions of kinsmen. People who have no blood-relations to appeal to for clearing the waste, for providing the necessary capital in the way of cattle and plough implements, for raising and fitting out buildings, join in order to carry on these economic undertakings, and also to help each other against enemies and aggressors. The members of these voluntary associations,
- ↑ They range from 80 or 90 to 700.
