As a result of poverty and lack of education at village level, some people thought, he said, that they could divorce a spouse on the authority of the village council or even by rejecting their wife and sending her back to her family's home.
Famed for their trademark macho outfits, including a policeman's uniform, a red Indian, and a construction worker, Village People - named in tribute to the New York's Greenwich Village gay district - launched themselves on the disco world in the late 1970s.
But I lived in a pit village and I knew many of the people that were on strike and I knew the way these people had to go out at night to gather waste coal just to keep their houses warm over the winter of '84-'85 and the impact that had on people.
BBC: Margaret Thatcher death: Opinion of her split in Sheffield
Dozens of people attended a drop-in session at Pangbourne Village Hall on Saturday, where they could talk to Reading West MP Alok Sharma and West Berkshire district councillor Pamela Bale.
People react to austerity by falling back on their family and village networks.
The people of Kivalina, Alaska are losing the ice their village is built on at an alarming rate, requiring urgent and expensive relocation.
FORBES: Hawaii: Our Very Own Island Nation, Battling Climate Change Via Innovation
"The main objective was to find an alternative income for the local community in the surrounding village and forest, and also relieve the pressure on the forest of people cutting timber, " says project manager Amiri Saidi.
The Eastern region has a long list of schemes which, for decades, businesses, motorists and local residents have been longing for: people were talking about a by-pass for the village of Elveden on the A11 back in the 1970s and there was talk of completely dualling the A47 in Norfolk in a 1988 government white paper.
People were always arriving or departing from the village, moving in or moving on.
One of the village's two dikes gave way on Monday night, killing at least five people.
People in Stoke-on-Trent raised funds to help reconstruct the village of Lidice near Prague after it was destroyed on 10 June 1942.
Losing the school has been hard on the village's small downtown, where businesses have lost out with fewer people going to school to pick up and drop off children.
WSJ: Newtown Residents Divided Over School Site 'Compromise'
If the chief and the Council cannot reach unanimous decision on an important issue, a village meeting is called and the issue put before the people, who will debate it until they reach a consensus.
On one end of the Roaring Fork Valley lie Aspen and Snowmass Village, where many affluent people live and vacation, and where housing prices are some of the highest in the United States.
The men from this village of roughly 9, 000 people got together with other nearby communities to decide that their women would not vote on May 11 either.
At least 43 people died and 25 were reported injured when torrents of water rushed down a mountain on to Andap village in the valley, local news sources reported.
About 250km (150 miles) to the north, in neighbouring Shanxi province, in Pingdong, a much poorer village, 250 people live along battered dirt roads, and try to grow wheat, corn, soyabeans and winter melon on the dry, rocky mountain land.
ECONOMIST: Farmers pay the price for decades of wasteful water use
应用推荐