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prescriptive right to the soil. His emancipation at once transformed him into a free proletarian, who,
moreover, found his master ready waiting for him in the towns, for the most part handed down as
legacies from the Roman time. When the revolution of the world-market, about the end of the 15th
century, annihilated Northern Italy’s commercial supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set
in. The labourers of the towns were driven en masse into the country, and gave an impulse, never
before seen, to the petite culture, carried on in the form of gardening.
Chapter 27: Expropriation of the Agricultural
Population From the Land
In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense
majority of the population
1
consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th century, of free
peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden.
In the larger seignorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a serf, was displaced by the free farmer.
The wage labourers of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilised their leisure time by
working on the large estates, partly of an independent special class of wage labourers, relatively
and absolutely few in numbers. The latter also were practically at the same time peasant farmers,
since, besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land to the extent of 4 or more acres,
together with their cottages. Besides they, with the rest of the peasants, enjoyed the usufruct of
the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf,
&c.
2
In all countries of Europe, feudal production is characterised by division of the soil amongst
the greatest possible number of subfeudatories. The might of the feudal lord, like that of the
sovereign, depended not on the length of his rent roll, but on the number of his subjects, and the
latter depended on the number of peasant proprietors.
3
Although, therefore, the English land, after
the Norman Conquest, was distributed in gigantic baronies, one of which often included some
900 of the old Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was bestrewn with small peasant properties, only here
and there interspersed with great seignorial domains. Such conditions, together with the
prosperity of the towns so characteristic of the 15th century, allowed of that wealth of the people
which Chancellor Fortescue so eloquently paints in his “Laudes legum Angliae;” but it excluded
the possibility of capitalistic wealth.
The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was
played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century. A mass of free
proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers,
who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” Although the
royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty
forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause
of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably
larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the
same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise
of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England,
gave the direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal
wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers.
Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was, therefore, its cry. Harrison, in his
“Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles,” describes how the expropriation of
small peasants is ruining the country. “What care our great encroachers?” The dwellings of the
peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay. “If,” says
Harrison, “the old records of euerie manour be sought... it will soon appear that in some manour
seventeene, eighteene, or twentie houses are shrunk... that England was neuer less furnished with
people than at the present... Of cities and townes either utterly decaied or more than a quarter or
half diminished, though some one be a little increased here or there; of townes pulled downe for
sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in them... I could saie somewhat.” The
complaints of these old chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they reflect faithfully the
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impression made on contemporaries by the revolution in the conditions of production. A
comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between
the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated
without any transition from its golden into its iron age.
Legislation was terrified at this revolution. It did not yet stand on that height of civilisation where
the “wealth of the nation” (i.e., the formation of capital, and the reckless exploitation and
impoverishing of the mass of the people) figure as the ultima Thule of all state-craft. In his history
of Henry VII., Bacon says: “Inclosures at that time (1489) began to be more frequent, whereby
arable land (which could not be manured without people and families) was turned into pasture,
which was easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years, lives, and at will (whereupon
much of the yeomanry lived) were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people, and (by
consequence) a decay of towns, churches, tithes, and the like... In remedying of this
inconvenience the king’s wisdom was admirable, and the parliament’s at that time... they took a
course to take away depopulating enclosures, and depopulating pasturage.” An Act of Henry VII.,
1489, cap. 19, forbad the destruction of all “houses of husbandry” to which at least 20 acres of
land belonged. By an Act, 25 Henry VIII., the same law was renewed. It recites, among other
things, that many farms and large flocks of cattle, especially of sheep, are concentrated in the
hands of a few men, whereby the rent of land has much risen and tillage has fallen off, churches
and houses have been pulled down, and marvellous numbers of people have been deprived of the
means wherewith to maintain themselves and their families. The Act, therefore, ordains the
rebuilding of the decayed farmsteads, and fixes a proportion between corn land and pasture land,
&c. An Act of 1533 recites that some owners possess 24,000 sheep, and limits the number to be
owned to 2,000.
4
The cry of the people and the legislation directed, for 150 years after Henry
VII., against the expropriation of the small farmers and peasants, were alike fruitless. The secret
of their inefficiency Bacon, without knowing it, reveals to us. “The device of King Henry VII.,”
says Bacon, in his “Essays, Civil and Moral,” Essay 29, “was profound and admirable, in making
farms and houses of husbandry of a standard; that is, maintained with such a proportion of land
unto them as may breed a subject to live in convenient plenty, and no servile condition, and to
keep the plough in the hands of the owners and not mere hirelings.”
5
What the capitalist system
demanded was, on the other hand, a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the
people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labour into capital.
During this transformation period, legislation also strove to retain the 4 acres of land by the
cottage of the agricultural wage labourer, and forbad him to take lodgers into his cottage. In the
reign of James I., 1627, Roger Crocker of Front Mill, was condemned for having built a cottage
on the manor of Front Mill without 4 acres of land attached to the same in perpetuity. As late as
Charles I.’s reign, 1638, a royal commission was appointed to enforce the carrying out of the old
laws, especially that referring to the 4 acres of land. Even in Cromwell’s time, the building of a
house within 4 miles of London was forbidden unless it was endowed with 4 acres of land. As
late as the first half of the 18th century complaint is made if the cottage of the agricultural
labourer has not an adjunct of one or two acres of land. Nowadays he is lucky if it is furnished
with a little garden, or if he may rent, far away from his cottage, a few roods. “Landlords and
farmers,” says Dr. Hunter, “work here hand in hand. A few acres to the cottage would make the
labourers too independent.”
6
The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and
frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church
property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great
part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the