All this land originally was the property not of any one
family or individual, but of the community. The study of the mark
carries us back to a time when there may have been private property in
weapons, utensils, or trinkets, but not in real estate.[3] Of the three
kinds of land the common mark, save where curtailed or usurped by lords
in the days of feudalism, has generally remained public property to this
day. The pleasant green commons or squares which occur in the midst of
towns and cities in England and the United States most probably
originated from the coalescence of adjacent mark-communities, whereby
the border-land used in common by all was brought into the centre of the
new aggregate. In towns of modern date this origin of the common is of
course forgotten, and in accordance with the general law by which the
useful thing after discharging its functions survives for purposes of
ornament, it is introduced as a pleasure-ground. In old towns of New
England, however, the little park where boys play ball or children and
nurses "take the air" was once the common pasture of the town. Even
Boston Common did not entirely cease to be a grazing-field until 1830.
It was in the village-mark, or assemblage of homesteads, that private
property in real estate naturally began. In the Russian villages to-day
the homesteads are private property, while the cultivated land is owned
in common.
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