society of some social moralists - perfect equality of opportunity, barring acts of God. But of course it did not.
Even if land is a free good, the means to work it are not. A man needs equipment and, more especially, draught animals. There is no doubt that in contrast to many primitive societies and to some other Middle Eastern areas, these villages contained landless men, or rather oxenless men. Even now, some richer households have servants - çirak - who live in their master's household. In the past such arrangements were quite common. One whole village, called, perhaps significantly, Çiraz, whose territory formed an enclave within that of a larger village, was said to have been founded entirely by freed servants of their richer neighbours. Presumably they had been rewarded by gifts of oxen and the right to plough in their masters' territory. Casual labour was also said to have been much commoner in the past. People in Elbashï were quite explicit about this. Once the village was full of landless labourers, they said, but now they had all got their own oxen and started to plough for themselves. To judge from stories about people's ancestral origins, many of these oxenless servants in the past were vagrants, but some must have been settled villagers.
Just how difficult it was to move from oxenless labourer to landowner it is hard to guess. Oxen are costly in relation to a subsistence income, and a man also needs a homestead, a plough and seed. Possibly share-cropping in some form offered a way or the rewards of shepherds and servants occasionally provided the necessary capital. Obviously some people did succeed. But equally obviously it was not as simple a matter to set up initially as a landowner as it was for an established landowner to expand his operations as his household grew.
Practically all village households own sheep and goats. These constitute a form of inheritable wealth apart from land, and might therefore upset the rough equality of inheritance between the sons of different households. Villages varied and still vary sharply in the extent to which they depend on sheep and goats. Even within one area, as de Planhol (1958, pp. 234 ff.) makes clear, rights to summer or winter pasture away from the village were fairly common but highly variable. Wealth in animals tends to follow a similar pattern. Special winter pastures are not normally available on the plateau, and the flock must be