3.  “Chacun s’en est accommode selon sa bienseance... on les a partages.. pour depouiller les communes, on s’est servi de dettes simulees” (Edict of Louis the Fourteenth, of 1667, quoted by several authors.  Eight years before that date the communes had been taken under State management).

4.  “On a great landlord’s estate, even if he has millions of revenue, you are sure to find the land uncultivated” (Arthur Young).  “One-fourth part of the soil went out of culture;” “for the last hundred years the land has returned to a savage state;” “the formerly flourishing Sologne is now a big marsh;” and so on (Theron de Montauge, quoted by Taine in Origines de la France Contemporaine, tome i. p. 441).

5.  A. Babeau, Le Village sous l’Ancien Regime, 3e edition.  Paris, 1892.

6.  In Eastern France the law only confirmed what the peasants had already done themselves.  See my work, The Great French Revolution, chaps. xlvii and xlviii, London (Heinemann), 1909.

7.  After the triumph of the middle-class reaction the communal lands were declared (August 24, 1794) the States domains, and, together with the lands confiscated from the nobility, were put up for sale, and pilfered by the bandes noires of the small bourgeoisie.  True that a stop to this pilfering was put next year (law of 2 Prairial, An V), and the preceding law was abrogated; but then the village Communities were simply abolished, and cantonal councils were introduced instead.  Only seven years later (9 Prairial, An xii), i.e. in 1801, the village communities were reintroduced, but not until after having been deprived of all their rights, the mayor and syndics being nominated by the Government in the 36,000 communes of France!  This system was maintained till after the revolution of 1830, when elected communal councils were reintroduced under the law of 1787.  As to the communal lands, they were again seized upon by the State in 1813, plundered as such, and only partly restored to the communes in 1816.  See the classical collection of French laws, by Dalloz, Repertoire de Jurisprudence; also the works of Doniol, Dareste, Bonnemere, Babeau, and many others.

8.  This procedure is so absurd that one would not believe it possible if the fifty-two different acts were not enumerated in full by a quite authoritative writer in the Journal des Economistes (1893, April, p. 94), and several similar examples were not given by the same author.

9.  Dr. Ochenkowski, Englands wirthschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters (Jena, 1879), pp. 35 seq., where the whole question is discussed with full knowledge of the texts.

10.  Nasse, Ueber die mittelalterliche Feldgemeinschaft und die Einhegungen des xvi.  Jahrhunderts in England (Bonn, 1869), pp. 4, 5; Vinogradov, Villainage in England (Oxford, 1892).

11.  Fr. Seebohm, The English Village Community, 3rd ed., 1884, pp. 13-15.