| caption: |
Chapter One. The Material Background |
| caption: |
localized wards or village divisions |
| text: |
The houses of a ward, which might number anything between twenty and eighty, were localized in one part of the village. Yet, the boundaries between the wards were not always visible. In some cases there was a narrow belt of shrubs or a ditch separating two wards, but where the number of houses of adjoining wards had inordinately increased, the space which had traditionally divided them had been fully utilized, with the result that houses of different wards stood side by side. Barring exceptional cases, no house site belonging to one ward could be alienated and occupied by a man of another ward, and sometimes it happened that in one ward of a village there might be a surplus of unused, overgrown land, while in an adjacent ward the houses stood crowded together with many built on very uneven ground. |
