in arable land too. Within this local community the
whole process of medieval production went on. The
common property in land, as well as the transmitted
private property in fields and gardens, supplied the
requisite means of life, the products of the cultivation
of the fields, of cattle rearing, of hunting and fishing,
and the raw materials which were worked up within the
patriarchal peasant family or by the handicraftsmen of
the village--wood, wool, etc.

Both private and public activity within this community
aimed at supplying articles of use for consumption by the
producer or his family or his community, or sometimes by
the feudal lord.

A local community was an economic organism which
was usually self-sufficing and had almost no economic
contact with the outside world. This led to a remarkable
exclusiveness. He who did not belong to the community
was accounted a stranger, devoid of rights or possessing
very few, even when he settled in the community, so long
as he did not acquire a holding of land. The whole world
outside the community was foreign. The members of the
community developed, on the one hand, aristocratic pride
towards newcomers from the world without, who were
unable to acquire any landed property, and, on the other
hand, that local narrowness, that parochial policy which
may still be seen in remote and backward countries. Upon
such foundations were based the particularism and the
separation of castes peculiar to the feudal Middle Ages.

The economic ties of the feudal State were therefore
extremely loose. Empires were rapidly formed and as
rapidly fell to pieces. Even the national language did not
form a tie of importance, as the exclusiveness of the local
communities favoured the formation and maintenance
of dialects.

The only strong organisation which stood above the

-5-