THE 13tra AND l4tH CENTURIES 63 
as in others, individual Chiefs and assignees may have 
followed their own inclinations. 
It can be said with confidence that the records of the 
century disclose no trace of either the institution, or the 
conception, of private ownership of land in the sense which 
the term “ownership” bears to-day. All forms of tenure 
were liable to summary resumption at the King’s pleasure, 
and, with a succession of despots of strong characters and 
varying views, the phrase ‘‘the King’s pleasure’ must be 
taken in its literal sense; even religious endowments, the 
nearest approach to what would now be called ownership, 
could be annulled by a stroke of the pen. The attitude of 
Firiiz to Grants in general was, indeed, such that a right of 
ownership in them seemed to be developing, but this de- 
velopment was not destined to proceed through later 
periods. So far as the peasants were concerned, the idea 
prevalent in Hindu times, that cultivation was a duty to 
the State, and not a right of the individual, still persisted, 
and manifested itself on occasion in administrative practice. 
The position of the Chiefs was a matter of politics rather 
than of law. Ordinarily they could hope to retain their 
jurisdiction so long as they paid the stipulated revenue; 
when they defaulted or rebelled, the matter in dispute was 
settled by force or by diplomacy according to circum- 
stances. 
Regarding the internal organisation of the villages, the 
chronicles are silent, and, if we take them by themselves, it 
is almost impossible to point to a single definite phrase 
indicating the existence of anything which could be described 
as an organised village; chance references to the headman'’s 
perquisites, and to the records of the village-accountant, 
are practically all that has survived. The inference that 
such institutions did not exist would, however, be unjusti- 
fiable. We shall meet them at later periods, bearing in- 
disputable marks of their great antiquity; it is incredible 
that they should have originated in the intervening cen- 
turies; and there are no grounds for questioning their con- 
tinuity from a date antecedent, at any rate, to the Moslem 
conquest. It is better to interpret the silence of the 
chronicles, not as showing that organised villages did not