y "ownership" preceded individual ownership, but in what sense
there was communal ownership by a whole village it is not so easy to
say.

Maine was on surer ground when, as in his studies of Irish and Hindu
law, he confined himself to the more immediate circle of the family
group. In his _Early Institutions_ he subjects the Brehon Laws of
early Ireland to a suggestive examination as presenting an example of
Celtic law largely unaffected by Roman influences. He there shows, as
he has shown in _Ancient Law_, that in early times the only social
brotherhood recognised was that of kinship, and that almost every form
of social organisation, tribe, guild, and religious fraternity, was
conceived of under a similitude of it. Feudalism converted the village
community, based on a real or assumed consanguinity of its members,
into the fief in which the relations of tenant and lord were those of
contract, while those of the unfree tenant rested on status. In his
_Early Law and Custom_ he pursues much the same theme by an
examination of Hindu Law as presenting a peculiarly close implication
of early law with religion. Here he devotes his attention chiefly to
Ancestor-worship, a subject which about this time had engaged the
attention, as regards its Greek and Roman forms, of that brilliant
Frenchman, Fustel de Coulanges, whose monograph _La Cite Antique_ is
now a classic. As is well known, the right of inheriting a dead man's
property and the duty of performing his obsequies are co-relative to
this day in Hindu law, and his investigation of this subject brings
Maine back to the subject of the Patriarchal Power. He points out that
both worshipper and the object of worship were exclusively males, and
concludes that it was the power of the father which generated the
practice of worshipping him, while this practice in turn, by the
gradual admission of women to participate in the ceremonies, gradually
acted as a solvent upon the power itself. The necessity of finding
some one to perform these rites, on failure of direct male heirs,
marked the beginning of the recognition of a right in women to
inherit. The conception of the family becomes less intense and more
extensive. These discussions brought Maine, in chapter VII. of _Early
Law and Custom_, to reconsider the main theory of _Ancient Law_ in the
light of the criticism to which it had been exposed, and every reader
of _Ancient Law_ who desires to understand Maine's exact position in
reg