in exchange for service. Strips of fertile soil
were allotted to the village families for cultivation, while
pasture-land, meadow, and forest were kept for community use. Even in
the heart of the city Boston Common remains as a relic of the old
custom. On the mediaeval manor people lived and worked together, most
of them on the same social level, the lord in his manor-house and the
peasants in a hamlet or larger village on his land, huddling together
in rude huts and in crude fashion performing the social and economic
functions of a rural community. In the village church the miller or
the blacksmith held his head a little higher than his neighbors, and
sometimes the lord of the manor did not deign to worship in the common
parish church, but the mass of the people were fellow serfs, owning a
common master, working at the same tasks, by custom sowing and reaping
the same kind of grain on the same kind of land in the same week of
the year. They attended the court of the master, who exercised the
functions of government. They worshipped side by side in the church.
The same customs bound them and the same superstitions worried their
waking hours. There was thus a community solidarity that less commonly
exists under modern conditions.

There was no stimulus to progress on the manor itself. There were no
schools for the peasant's children, and there was little social
intelligence. The finer side of life was undeveloped, except as the
love of music was stirred by the travelling bard, or martial fervor or
the love of movement aroused the dance. There was no desire for
religious independence or understanding of religious experience. The
mass in the village church satisfied the religious instinct. There was
no dynamic factor in the community itself. Besides all this, the
community lived a self-centred life, because the people manufactured
their own cloth and leather garments and most of the necessary tools,
and, except for a few commodities like iron and salt, they were
independent of trade. The result was that every stimulus of social
exchange between villages was lacking.

The broadening influence of the Crusades with their stimulus to
thought, their creation of new economic wants, and their contact of
races and nationalities, set in motion great changes. Out of the
manorial villages went ambitious individuals, making their way as
industrial pioneers to the opportunity of the larger towns, as now
young people push out from th