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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.
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