again (in 1813); and only in 1816 what remained of them, i.e. about 15,000,000 acres of the least productive land, was restored to the village communities.(7) Still this was not yet the end of the troubles of the communes.  Every new regime saw in the communal lands a means for gratifying its supporters, and three laws (the first in 1837 and the last under Napoleon the Third) were passed to induce the village communities to divide their estates.  Three times these laws had to be repealed, in consequence of the opposition they met with in the villages; but something was snapped up each time, and Napoleon the Third, under the pretext of encouraging perfected methods of agriculture, granted large estates out of the communal lands to some of his favourites.

As to the autonomy of the village communities, what could be retained of it after so many blows?  The mayor and the syndics were simply looked upon as unpaid functionaries of the State machinery.  Even now, under the Third Republic, very little can be done in a village community without the huge State machinery, up to the prefet and the ministries, being set in motion.  It is hardly credible, and yet it is true, that when, for instance, a peasant intends to pay in money his share in the repair of a communal road, instead of himself breaking the necessary amount of stones, no fewer than twelve different functionaries of the State must give their approval, and an aggregate of fifty-two different acts must be performed by them, and exchanged between them, before the peasant is permitted to pay that money to the communal council.  All the remainder bears the same character.(8)

What took place in France took place everywhere in Western and Middle Europe.  Even the chief dates of the great assaults upon the peasant lands are the same.  For England the only difference is that the spoliation was accomplished by separate acts rather than by general sweeping measures—­with less haste but more thoroughly than in France.  The seizure of the communal lands by the lords also began in the fifteenth century, after the defeat of the peasant insurrection of 1380—­as seen from Rossus’s Historia and from a statute of Henry the Seventh, in which these seizures are spoken of under the heading of “enormitees and myschefes as be hurtfull... to the common wele."(9) Later on the Great Inquest, under Henry the Eighth, was begun, as is known, in order to put a stop to the enclosure of communal lands, but it ended in a sanction of what had been done.(10) The communal lands continued to be preyed upon, and the peasants were driven from the land.  But it was especially since the middle of the eighteenth century that, in England as everywhere else, it became part of a systematic policy to simply weed out all traces of communal ownership; and the wonder is not that it has disappeared, but that it could be maintained, even in England, so as to be “generally prevalent so late as the grandfathers of this generation."(11) The very object of the Enclosure Acts, as shown by Mr. Seebohm, was to remove this system,(12) and it was so well removed by the nearly four thousand Acts passed between 1760 and 1844 that only faint traces of it remain now.  The land of the village communities was taken by the lords, and the appropriation was sanctioned by Parliament in each separate case.