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proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal
favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en
masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed
property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated.
7
“Pauper ubique
jacet,” cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England. In the 43rd year of her reign the
nation was obliged to recognise pauperism officially by the introduction of a poor-rate. “The
authors of this law seem to have been ashamed to state the grounds of it, for [contrary to
traditional usage] it has no preamble whatever.”
8
By the 16th of Charles I., ch. 4, it was declared
perpetual, and in fact only in 1834 did it take a new and harsher form.
9
These immediate results
of the Reformation were not its most lasting ones. The property of the church formed the
religious bulwark of the traditional conditions of landed property. With its fall these were no
longer tenable.
10
Even in the last decade of the 17th century, the yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were
more numerous than the class of farmers. They had formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength,
and, even according to the confession of Macaulay, stood in favourable contrast to the drunken
squires and to their servants, the country clergy, who had to marry their masters’ cast-off
mistresses. About 1750, the yeomanry had disappeared,
11
and so had, in the last decade of the
18th century, the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer. We leave on one side
here the purely economic causes of the agricultural revolution. We deal only with the forcible
means employed.
After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed proprietors carried, by legal means, an act of
usurpation, effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. They abolished the
feudal tenure of land, i.e., they got rid of all its obligations to the State, “indemnified” the State
by taxes on the peasantry and the rest of the mass of the people, vindicated for themselves the
rights of modern private property in estates to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally,
passed those laws of settlement, which, mutatis mutandis, had the same effect on the English
agricultural labourer, as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunof on the Russian peasantry.
The “glorious Revolution” brought into power, along with William of Orange, the landlord and
capitalist appropriators of surplus-value.
12
They inaugurated the new era by practising on a
colossal scale thefts of state lands, thefts that had been hitherto managed more modestly. These
estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by direct
seizure.
13
All this happened without the slightest observation of legal etiquette. The Crown lands
thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the robbery of the Church estates, as far as these had
not been lost again during the republican revolution, form the basis of the today princely domains
of the English oligarchy.
14
The bourgeois capitalists favoured the operation with the view, among
others, to promoting free trade in land, to extending the domain
of modern agriculture on the
large farm-system, and to increasing their supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready to
hand. Besides, the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of the
newly-hatched haute finance, and of the large manufacturers, then depending on protective
duties. The English bourgeoisie acted for its own interest quite as wisely as did the Swedish
bourgeoisie who, reversing the process, hand in hand with their economic allies, the peasantry,
helped the kings in the forcible resumption of the Crown lands from the oligarchy. This happened
since 1604 under Charles X. and Charles XI.
Communal property – always distinct from the State property just dealt with – was an old
Teutonic institution which lived on under cover of feudalism. We have seen how the forcible
usurpation of this, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the
end of the 15th and extends into the 16th century. But, at that time, the process was carried on by
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means of individual acts of violence against which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years,
fought in vain. The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself
becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the large farmers make
use of their little independent methods as well.
15
The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of
Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which
the landlords grant
themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M.
Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he tries to represent communal property as
the private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords, when he,
himself, demands a “general Act of Parliament for the enclosure of Commons” (admitting thereby
that a parliamentary coup d’état is necessary for its transformation into private property), and
moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification for the expropriated poor.
16
Whilst the place of the independent yeoman was taken by tenants at will, small farmers on yearly
leases, a servile rabble dependent on the pleasure of the landlords, the systematic robbery of the
Communal lands helped especially, next to the theft of the State domains, to swell those large
farms, that were called in the 18th century capital farms
17
or merchant farms,
18
and to “set free”
the agricultural population as proletarians for manufacturing industry.
The 18th century, however, did not yet recognise as fully as the 19th, the identity between
national wealth and the poverty of the people. Hence the most vigorous polemic, in the economic
literature of that time, on the “enclosure of commons.” From the mass of materials that lie before
me, I give a few extracts that will throw a strong light on the circumstances of the time. “In
several parishes of Hertfordshire,” writes one indignant person, “24 farms, numbering on the
average 50-150 acres, have been melted up into three farms.”
19
“In Northamptonshire and
Leicestershire the enclosure of common lands has taken place on a very large scale, and most of
the new lordships, resulting from the enclosure, have been turned into pasturage, in consequence
of which many lordships have not now 50 acres ploughed yearly, in which 1,500 were ploughed
formerly. The ruins of former dwelling-houses, barns, stables, &c.,” are the sole traces of the
former inhabitants. “An hundred houses and families have in some open-field villages dwindled
to eight or ten.... The landholders in most parishes that have been enclosed only 15 or 20 years,
are very few in comparison of the numbers who occupied them in their open-field state. It is no
uncommon thing for 4 or 5 wealthy graziers to engross a large enclosed lordship which was
before in the hands of 20 or 30 farmers, and as many smaller tenants and proprietors. All these are
hereby thrown out of their livings with their families and many other families who were chiefly
employed and supported by them.”
20
It was not only the land that lay waste, but often land
cultivated either in common or held under a definite rent paid to the community, that was
annexed by the neighbouring landlords under pretext of enclosure. “I have here in view
enclosures of open fields and lands already improved. It is acknowledged by even the writers in
defence of enclosures that these diminished villages increase the monopolies of farms, raise the
prices of provisions, and produce depopulation ... and even the enclosure of waste lands (as now
carried on) bears hard on the poor, by depriving them of a part of their subsistence, and only goes
towards increasing farms already too large.”
21
“When,” says Dr. Price, “this land gets into the
hands of a few great farmers, the consequence must be that the little farmers” (earlier designated
by him “a multitude of little proprietors and tenants, who maintain themselves and families by the
produce of the ground they occupy by sheep kept on a common, by poultry, hogs, &c., and who
therefore have little occasion to purchase any of the means of subsistence”) “will be converted
into a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others, and who will be under a
necessity of going to market for all they want.... There will, perhaps, be more labour, because
there will be more compulsion to it.... Towns and manufactures will increase, because more will