Lectures on the Early History of Institutions

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Lectures on the Early History of Institutions by Henry Sumner Maine
1875
John Murray Ltd.
London, 1875.

Preface
In the Lectures printed in this Volume an attempt is made to carry farther in some particulars the line of investigation pursued by the Author in an earlier work on 'Ancient Law'. The fortunes of the legal system which then supplied him with the greatest number of his illustrations have been strikingly unlike those of another body of law from which he has now endeavoured to obtain some new materials for legal and social history. The Roman Law has never ceased to be spoken of with deep respect, and it is in fact the source of the greatest part of the rules by which civil life is still governed in the Western World. The Ancient Irish Law, the so-called Brehon Law, has been for the most part bitterly condemned by the few writers who have noticed it; and, after gradually losing whatever influence it once possessed in the country in which it grew up, in the end it was forcibly suppressed. Yet the very cases which have denied a modern history to the Brehon Law have given it a especial interest of its own in our day through the arrest of its development; and this interest, the Author hopes, is sufficient to serve as his excuse for making the conclusions it suggests the principal subject of the Lectures now published, except the last three.
The obligations o￡ the Author to various Gentlemen for instruction derived from their published writings or private communications are acknowledged in the body of the work, but he has to express his especial thanks to the Bishop of Limerick, and to Professor Thaddeus O'Mahony, for facilities of access to the still unpublished translations of Brehon manuscripts, as well as for many valuable suggestions.
The Lectures (with the omission of portions) have all been delivered at Oxford.
27 Cornwall Gardens, London, S.W.;
November 1874.

Lecture One.
New Materials for the Early History of Institutions
The sources of information concerning the early history of institutions which have been opened to us are numerous and valuable. On one subject in particular, which may be confidently said to have been almost exclusively investigated till lately by writers who had followed a false path, the additions to our knowledge are of special interest and importance. We at length know something concerning the beginnings of the great institution of Property in Land. The collective ownership of the soil by groups of men either in fact united by blood-relationships, or believing or assuming that they are so united, is now entitled to take rank as an ascertained primitive phenomenon, once universally characterising those communities of mankind between whose civilisation and our own there is any distinct connection or analogy. The evidence has been found on all sides of us, dimly seen and verifiable with difficulty in countries which have undergone the enormous pressure of the Roman Empire, or which have been strongly affected by its indirect influence, but perfectly plain and unmistakeable in the parts of the world, peopled by the Aryan race, where the Empire has made itself felt very slightly or not at all. As regards the Sclavonic communities, the enfranchisement of the peasantry of the Russian dominions in Europe has given a stimulus to enquiries which formerly had attractions for only a few curious observers, and the amount of information collected has been very large. We now know much more clearly than we did before that the soil of the older provinces of the Russian Empire has been, from time immemorial, almost exclusively distributed among groups of self-styled kinsmen, collected in cultivating village-communities, self-organised and self-governing; and, since the great measure of the present reign, the collective rights of these communities, and the rights and duties of their members in respect of one another, are no longer entangled with and limited by the manorial privileges of an owner-in-chief. There is also fresh evidence that the more backward of the outlying Sclavonic societies are constituted upon essentially the same model; and it is one of the facts with which the Western world will some day assuredly have to reckon, that the political ideas of so large a portion of the human race, and its ideas of property also, are inextricably bound up with the notions of family interdependency, of collective ownership, and of natural subjection to patriarchal power. The traces of the ancient social order in the Germanic and Scandinavian countries are, I need scarcely say, considerably fainter, and tend always to become more obscured; but the re-examination of the written evidence respecting ancient Teutonic life and custom proceeds without intermission, and incidentally much light has been thrown on the early history of property by the remarkable work of Sohm ('Frankische Reichs-und Gerichtsverfassung'). The results obtained by the special method of G.L. Von Maurer have