ABSTRACT
THE jurisdictional aspects of the tsu, the guild and the village have been examined in some detail, and it has been shown that, taken all together, they offered a substantial extension of the official legal machinery. It can be seen that in China offences were punished and disputes were formally adjudicated by the authority of the group most nearly concerned, and that this was done with the approval of the administration. The tsu, the guild and the village may be thought of as operating as subordinate tribunals of the official courts, and the norms they enforced as an extension or amplification of official codes which the official courts, if appealed to, would endorse. On this analysis, specialization took place—though with some blurring at the edges—at the lowest level: the tsu dealt with questions of inheritance, adoption and the ancestral cult, the guilds with the regulation of trades, and villages with land law and contracts of sale or tenancy. 1
