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groups of villagers were most important. From them was elected a council of 'elders'.
Other village residents included traders and craftsmen, for both Bali and Java at that time had highly developed trading systems and high standards in many arts and crafts. These traders and craftsmen were included along with serfs, peons and newcomers to the village as a group outside thie core, living in a separate part of the village. Also living alongside this core in the territory of the village were officias answerable to royal authority, who acted as kinds of police and overseers of taxation, corvee and trade duties. The kings further placed themselves as supreme authority over the local lords who supervised and supported groups of temples and villages. Society was therefore organized into a hierarchy from villagers to king. The coming of Majapahit rule to Bali started to change the importance of the village as an institution in the state. But it was not until the kingdom of Gelgel emerged, probably in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, that the changes took full effect. Majapahit and Gelgel are associated with the undermining of the unity of the billage and the introduction of a new system of corvee labour. Formerly the villages of Bali were semiautonomous, and their organization was similar to that of the Bali Aga or original Balinese villages which still exist in the east and in the mountains of the island. What the Majapahit and Gelgel rulers may have done was break down the untiy of the village by breaking it into smaller units called banjar which grouped households according to corvee obligations. Each banjar carried out its obligations under a court appointed head or klian. This system displaced the councils of elders, and meant that there was no separation between core villagers and newcomers. Likewise the artisans and other outsiders ceased to reside outside the walls of the village, and the walls themselves disappeared so that only individual house-yards were walled. Such changes as this could only occur slowly, leaving relatively little evidence of their nature, and the system as a while can only be retrospectively explained through the picture which emerges from nineteenth-century sources. 
The new system divided the population into 'outsiders' and 'insiders'. The peasantry, the majority of the population, were outsiders. Royalty and their priesthood were insiders- members of royal or priestly houses (called puri or palaces and geria or priests' dwellings). Commoners who achieved high rank and office in the palace, or became elevated servants of kings and priests, received the title of Jero, meaning 'inside' in recognition of their status. The same title was given to commoner wives of royalty or priests, but also to commoner temple priests and shadow play puppeteers....((but apparently not to smiths?))
Commoners occupied a vast range of ranks in state and religious offices and it was possible for a commoner to move from being an 'outsider' to being an insider....
Most commoners, however, wanted to be tied to the courts. The commoners who were soldieers, artists, artisans and performers for the courts shared in the beauty of court society. The hierarchy was spiritual as well. By rising in wealth, rank and status, people could elevate their whole family, ancestors and
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