抄録
In the Mori clan domain (present Yamaguchi Prefecture), village system was peculiary complicated in the Edo period (ca. 17th cent. to early 19th cent.). Broadly, there were two types of villages, large villages of about two or three hundred houses and small ones of about thirty houses. The former was an administrative unit of the clan government, while the latter was a basic unit for everyday life of a community.
The parallel existence of these two types of villages in the Mori clan domain can be explained from the following two facts:
(1) “Hamlet” used to be the fundamental form of rural settlement,
(2) “Fief system”* was not extinct in some parts of the domain.
*Fief system is one of typical feudalism where by the lord upper-class vassals are invested with rights to sway the land inhabited from their ancestors.
In the Mori clan domain, the fief held by vassals even in the early nineteenth century accounted for thirty percent of the whole domain, intermingled with the land controlled directly by lord, which, I believe, is another cause that made the village system in the Mori clan government all the more complicated.
Compared with villages ruled by other clans, omura of the Mori (i.e. a large village as an administrative unit) was quite large both in land and population, so that it was divided into some smaller components, that is, go or bun. Go and bun, however, were of different origins: go was a substantial region of old which had developed with a shrine as its core, whereas bun was a formal region arbitrarily contrived by the lord in the Edo period so as to meet the complicated state of the village system.
Both of them, although their original characters were different, were divided into still smaller components, that is, komura or kumi. As previously stated, komura or a smaller village had an important function as a community based upon villagers' everyday life. On the other hand, kumi was an administrative group of houses divised by the authority for the better control of peasant.
As a good exemplary village that will show clearly complicated village system in the Mori clan domain, I picked up Shuho-cho and its vicinity, and tried to illustrate some features peculiar to the Mori clan village system.
