A hundred years ago Emile de Laveleye, in what was destined to become a historical classic, albeit a flawed one, lamented the passing of rural communal institutions which, he said, had secured to countrymen from the most remote times the enjoyment of liberty, equality and order, and as great a degree of happiness as is compatible with human destinies.' Later students disavowed Laveleye's theories about the history of property, but many of them shared his regret for the demise of communalism. Dying or recently dead institutions sometimes inspire a romantic nostalgia even among supposedly sophisticated scholars, and peasant life of times gone by has not escaped this fate. Not that all historians have succumbed to the good old days syndrome. A French historian recently observed that nothing was less egalitarian than the French village. Jacques Bonhomme never existed save in the imagination of pamphleteers and novelists.'2 That judgment, too, needs tempering. It seems reasonable to assume that the old peasant community, like most other human institutions, had both its blessings and its shortcomings, although even for this, as for every other generalization about these communities, only an assumption is possible. Their great number, the many differences among them, the obscurity which veils so much of the history of Europe's peasantry, are a sampling of the obstacles which conspire to make definitive conclusions about the village community difficult if not impossible. The village community as a corporate body managing communal resources, directing the economic activities, and supervising the communal life of its residents first emerged in Europe during the later part of the Middle Ages and spread across the Continent in the succeeding centuries. Its disintegration began in the eighteenth century and completed itself in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its con-