176 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA 
but there is one case in which they may have been 
utilised in Moslem times, though the fact is not recorded. 
We have seen in Chapter IV that Akbar’s administrators 
prepared a set of assessment-schedules differentiated to 
meet the local conditions prevailing in the different portions 
of the Empire; and I conjecture that, in defining the area 
to which a particular schedule was to apply, they may have 
been guided, among other data, by the soil-rates recognised 
in the villages, and used in determining intra-village pay- 
ments. On this view, the division of Akbar’s Empire into 
circles with separate schedules of rates would stand in 
historical relation with the assessment-circles of the nine- 
teenth century, which were based largely on the soil-rates 
actually prevailing: but the schedules themselves were 
not based on differences of soil, but on differences of yield. 
Outside the village, as inside it, there is no apparent 
breach of continuity. Assignments still existed, though 
they had become much less important; the village paid the 
revenue ordinarily to a Chief or to a Farmer, and the fact 
that farms tended to increase in duration finds a ready 
explanation in the changes resulting from the decay of the 
Mogul administration. The stability of the institutions 
whose history can be traced justifies us in asking whether 
we can carry back through the Moslem period those other 
institutions on which Moslem chronicles throw so little 
light—the Brotherhood, the peasants outside the Brother- 
hood, and the minor tenures. which have been described 
above. 
As to the minor tenures, it may be said with confidence 
that no inference can be drawn from their non-appearance 
in the chronicles, because they would have been mentioned 
only by accident. The village servants are obviously an old 
institution, the methods of their remuneration bear the 
stamp of antiquity, and, in the absence of anything like 
evidence to the contrary, it is reasonable to infer that their 
tenure of small areas of land has persisted from very early 
times. Somewhat similar considerations are applicable 
1 The early English records of the Upper Doib contain occasional 
references to the baldhar, or village menial. It will be remembered that 
the regulations of Aliuddin Khalji mentioned the baldhar as representing 
the lowest stratum in the rural population