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MARJORIE TOPLEY
when wealth was available because property was needed, particularly land, for their economic support. The more extensive cult organizations might indeed own not only land but other property outside the village: irrigation works for example. With a hall-land (or other property) complex a village could not only engage in more elaborate rites but a community organization could be built round it. Halls often became centres for trying village disputes, teaching the young, and conferring on matters regarding a village's external relations and those with the local government administration. Births and deaths were reported to the hall and genealogies constructed and kept there. Genealogies often contained rules and regulations for governing relations between members of villages based on kinship, some even stipulating measures of punishment. Others regulated use of common property.3
Members of a mono-lineage village could benefit considerably through the economic extensions of an ancestral hall organization. Lineage land dedicated to the ancestors might be allocated to poor farmers at low rent; used in rotation by branches of the lineage free of charge; or rented to outsiders, income being used to finance loans to needy members. Hall wealth could be used to finance education of villagers for the State examinations, potentially raising the number of scholars in the village and thus its status and power in the area.
Ideally lineage affairs, certainly the rituals of the ancestral cult round which the hall was built, were under the control of senior men of the lineage in terms of generation. But such men would not necessarily be rich or scholarly since no rule of primogeniture obtained. Those controlling were likely to be the wealthy and also the scholarly of the village. The importance of scholarship and good connexions to the emergence of a hall-land complex is clearly emphasised in the literature. Managers would likely come from rich gentry families who promoted the organization and added to its property irrespective of generational position.
A complex ancestral hall association would require scholars who knew the correct rituals, could write genealogies, and draw up regulations. It would need them also to meet with locally-based officials and arrange that village interests were protected (etiquette forbade those unequal in education and other attainments to meet face to face to discuss matters of mutual concern). In