ll other that dwell in the ancient
burgages or dwelling-houses within the said town, ought and had used
time out of mind to have common of pasture, without any colour of lawful
right had enclosed and tilled two parcels thereof containing about
fourteen or sixteen acres and made divers leases thereof to persons
unknown, and had shut up an ancient lane or way, commonly called Dark
Lane, leading from the said town to the said common of Hatchmoor,
through which the inhabitants of the said town had always time out of
mind, until the said enclosure, used go and drive to the said common, to
the great hindrance, hurt, and damage of the said complainants, and to
the disinherison of the said town for ever."

That towns, and even great towns, abode by the traditions of country
life, is now abundantly manifest, but the indications above given shed
only partial light on rural conditions in their earliest and fullest
form. These will furnish the theme of the following chapter, which, it
is hoped, will furnish the clue to much that is mysterious in the data
thus far supplied.

RURAL

CHAPTER XVIII

COUNTRY PROPER

The state of things exhibited in the previous chapter is essentially
transitional. What we have there seen is the town emerging out of the
country, or, to put it another way, the country merging, through the
principle of attraction, into the focus of the town. This method of
viewing the subject is necessarily partial and incomplete. The existence
of a common in association with a town or village or group of villages
is not a self-evident proposition, to be taken for granted. It is
clearly part of a system which it now becomes our business to
investigate.

To all appearances many of the arrangements found in the course of, and
to the close of, the Middle Ages, and even (in a decaying and
disappearing form) almost to our own generation, were descended from
that well-nigh immemorial antiquity, in which our forefathers were
colonists in what was to them a new world--a world of forest and of fen,
of man-eating beasts, and alien foemen as fierce or fiercer than they.
These conditions determined the course of action of the men who lived
under them. For safety, men of one blood dwelt together in a stockaded
village or tun. They and their stock, however, had to subsist on their
labour and the bounty of the earth; and therefore around the village a
tract of cultivable land was appropriated to the use of the community.