Local Government (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE PARISH The Township?The Manor?The Ancient Parish?Different Kinds of Parishes?The Modern Civil Parish?The Overseers?The Vestry?The Local Government Act, 1894?The Parish Meeting ?The Parish Council?The Ecclesiastical Parish. The Township Many writers have taken great interest in tracing a relationship between the Saxon township, the English parish, the French or Belgian commune, and the Indian village community. All are but variations, they contend, of one common type which reproduces itself where- ever the Aryan race is found. The essential features of the Indian village community, described by Sir Henry Maine, were reproduced in the mark system of our Teutonic forefathers, which these writers assume to be the parent of our township and parish. The mark, like the village community, was peopled by a group of families bound together by a more or less fictitious tie of kinship, who jointly owned its lands, and cultivated them on the same agricultural system.The rights and duties of these co-proprietors inter se were conceived and regulated on the assumption that they were all related. Traces of the old " three- fields " or " open-field " system of agriculture still linger in remote parishes in England: no doubt, the common lands in many places were worked in strips, and often by joint labour. But there is no evidence that any general system of democratic village communism ever prevailed in England. Coincidence of custom is no proof of common origin. All we can say is that a system of common field husbandry did undoubtedly prevail in England; and that, where it did prevail, it was probably regulated by the men of each township in meeting assembled. The township was so called from the tun or hedge which surrounded the group of homesteads. Around the homest...