The Origin of Capitalism 1
Enclosure of Feudal Common Land
This Page 1, together with Page 2 ‘Explanations’, should be used together to understand the Origin of Capitalism.
This page looks at the way in which the population of peasant farmers who worked the land to provide their own subsistence (and that of the ruling Lord) were turned off the land to become the propertyless wage dependent working class.
Page 2 looks at competing explanations about how this mass dispossession resulted in the establishment of the capitalist system that eventually came to dominate the whole world.
These preliminary draft pages have become necessary to try to make sense of Adam Smith’s failure to properly look at this matter. In his Wealth of Nations, Smith complacently accepts the establishment of private property and the origin of the growing capitalism around him as ‘given’. He glosses over the original accumulation of capital and private land, calling it the result of ‘parsimony’ as frugal individuals or generations of a frugal family gradually amass sufficient capital to enable them to put others to work for them. He positions this as occurring in the ‘Age of Shepherds’, but makes no attempt to examine how this actually happened as a historical process.
It seems the first person to take issue with Smith’s treatment was Marx who instead described a coercive and often violent process whereby agricultural workers were turned off the land that had supported them for centuries in the confusingly named ‘primitive accumulation’, otherwise referred to as the process of enclosure.
This very tentative first draft takes a first look at the historical processes that led from feudalism to capitalism. It leans very heavily on ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’ by Simon Fairlie (2009).
What follows is structured like this:-
The nature of the Feudal Background in Britain and Europe will first be outlined to establish the general social and economic ‘starting point’ of the transition process to be explored.
There follows the main section, Enclosure, drawing on Simon Fairlie’s detailed account of the nature of enclosure itself and looks at the way in which self supporting agricultural peasants were persuaded or forced to give up their entitlement to the land that had supported them for so long, and to become dependent on wage labour to make a living.
At the end of this page Appendix 1 looks at some of the more prominent peasant rebellions and at the consequences for those taking part in, or leading, them.
The Feudal Background
Eleventh to Fourteenth Century
While several disagreements quickly become apparent about the history and nature of feudalism it seems sensible to take things at face value and to look at Feudalism from the 11th century onwards. In England, William the Norman conqueror, whether replacing some other arrangement that was in place before or merely putting his own stamp on pre-existing feudal arrangements, set about consolidating his victory throughout the land. After some initial years of resistance, he allocated tracts of land to his supporting Barons in order to pacify and control the country.
Via a process called Vassalage the two parties Monarch and vassal (or Baron) agreed certain obligations to one another. In essence the Monarch allocated land to the vassal, in return for a commitment that the vassal would provide military support and other services to the monarch whenever called upon.
This transfer, though, was a process of feoffment whereby the vassal, and perhaps any heirs as well, was given ownership rights over the land, but not ownership of the land itself – that remained with the monarch. However the feoffee (vassal, Lord) was able to sub divide the holding and create a new manor enfeoffed to a follower – to whom he was now overlord.
Whilst such feudal systems occurred across Europe it is important to say that much local variation existed in these arrangements, and in some areas barely existed at all. For example, according to Moore (2003; Footnote P 103) the peasantry in the Low Countries (e.g. the Netherlands) were relatively free from feudal control; but it was still an agrarian economy based on peasant output and tributes (rent or produce) had to be paid.
Harman (1989, P 2) gives an overview of the more general situation,
“… feudalism was an overwhelmingly rural society. Almost the whole ofthe population lived off the land, in more or less self contained manorial villages.Control of each manor lay with the feudal lord – either a warrior or an ecclesiastical body – exercising political and juridical as well as economic power in the locality.
The mass of peasants were serfs, unable to leave the manor, where they tilled strips of land for themselves but also provided for the livelihood of the feudal lord, either by forced labour on his estate (‘demesne’) or by payment of rent in kind. Money played very little role in rural life, with the feudal lords using serf labour to produce non-agricultural produce in demesne workshops.”
This rural, feudal society was built around 2 important features, the medieval village and the open field system. This extract from Historic England describes in general how these features worked together.
“Medieval villages were organised agricultural communities, sited at the centre of a parish or township, that shared resources such as arable land, meadow and woodland …. Medieval villages were supported by a communal system of agriculture based on large, unenclosed open arable fields. These large fields were subdivided into strips (known as lands) which were allocated to individual tenants. The cultivation of these strips with heavy ploughs pulled by oxen-teams produced long, wide ridges and the resultant `ridge and furrow’ where it survives is the most obvious physical indication of the open field system. Individual strips or lands were laid out in groups known as furlongs defined by terminal headlands at the plough turning-points and lateral grass baulks. Furlongs were in turn grouped into large open fields. Well preserved ridge and furrow …. Is usually now covered by the hedges or walls of subsequent field enclosure.”
(Medieval settlement, including open field system, immediately west of Bentley Fields Farm, (1956), Historic England, list-entry/1018618.)
More detail of the open field system is provided by Simon Fairlie, (2009). He describes the system as dominant in the flatter arable areas of England in the late medieval period (about 1250 to 1500). Peasants, on land controlled by the Lords, were allowed rights to graze their flocks, cut wood, draw water and grow crops on various plots of land at specified times of the year. Peasants, therefore, were allowed certain rights over the land by the Lord in much the same way as the Lord was allowed rights by the Monarch.
The nature of the system was influenced by the use of the large wheeled plough, developed in what is now France. These ploughs dealt well with heavy clay soils, but needed up to eight oxen to pull them. Few, if any, peasants could afford that many oxen, so use of the ploughs became a cooperative exercise. The strips of land, ideal for the ploughs, were farmed on a two or three year cycle with one year left fallow; so each peasant needed strips in different sections of the overall site so that there was always land to be farmed when some was left fallow.
A consequence of this rotation system, and because all the livestock grazed the fields when they were fallow or out of the growing and harvest periods, was that everyone had to stick to the same general pattern of ploughing and growing; crops grown out of season might well be eaten or trampled by other peoples livestock.
This system, together with the demesne work for the lord – and remembering that there was much regional variation – comprised the way of life for people for several centuries following the Norman invasion.
Moore (2003, 105 to111) calls the first few centuries after the Norman invasion, the Golden age of European feudalism, which saw rapid population growth, new settlements in eastern and central Europe, overseas military crusades against non Christians and the growth of cities. Alongside all this, manufacturing output and cash crop agriculture grew and developments in sea transport, financial mechanisms and business ventures opened up divisions of labour between far flung regions. Socially, the third interest group, that of the ‘states’ – presumably the monarchs as well as the city states – began to gather their power relative to the feudal lords.
After this period of stability, if not social justice, Moore describes how things began to deteriorate near the start of the 14th century. The Lords began to lose income, peasant revolts started, famines occurred, states went to war and financiers and traders in the city-states began to lose money.
He attributes this crisis to feudal relationships over land. On one hand there was no effective coercion or incentive able to induce peasants to raise their productivity, but on the other, when production did rise the surplus was taken by feudal rents, levies and taxes – the main income source of the Lords and the States.
Rising population levels provided the background to this situation; but while rising peasant population was a means of raising production and of providing more hands for military purposes it also meant progressively smaller peasant land holdings, at the same time as the families of the Lords also grew, together with the number of their retainers (hangers on).
As feudalism limped into the 13 hundreds the climate got colder, land quality deteriorated from over- farming, and trading routes extending into Asia produced a wider disease pool into which the Black Death of 1348 moved – killing one third of Europe’s population, 25 million people, in 3 years.
Moore argues that the Black Death was the final straw in the ultimate demise of feudalism, but points to class contradictions that were already pushing things in that direction. He argues that the most successful developmental aspects of feudalism – those of commerce, urbanisation and the growth of states – added to the potential class power of the peasants. He quotes Anderson (1974, 202), who wrote – referring to Peasant Revolts – that,
“the penetration of the countryside by commodity exchange had weakened customary relationships, and the advent of royal taxation now often overlaid traditional noble exactions in the villages; both tended to centralize popular reactions to seigneurial extortion or repression, into major collective movements”
(Note: ‘Seigneurs’ is another term used to refer to the Lords)
Added to this, says Moore, the Black Death attacked rising population levels upon which Feudalism depended, and the resulting lower numbers of peasant labourers reduced output, raised wages and lowered feudal revenues. By the early 14th century previously local peasant revolts reached regional or even national levels, making the renewal of serfdom as a solution to the crisis extremely unlikely.
In the first half of the 14th century the nobility first tried to solve its problems by cracking down on the peasantry and driving down wages, while the states attempted to bolster feudal control by introducing repressive legislation. These measures, however, only unified discontent and provoked larger revolts (Moore 115).
The eventual upshot of all this was an amalgamation of the lords, the states and the city state capitalists – normally in competition with one another – in support of a solution based on overseas expansion. This was seen as far less expensive than internal measures that didn’t appear to be effective anyway.
After much more discussion of these issues Moore (126) summarises like this,
“The fourteenth-century crisis strengthened the western European peasantry and weakened the states, the seigneurs, and the city-state capitalists. Feudal relations were severely weakened in Western Europe, and try as they might, the ruling classes could not re-impose the status quo ante. Geographical expansion was therefore a more attractive option than fighting the class war at home; or even waging war against one’s territorial rivals. But geographical expansion was also an attractive option because of Europe’s physico-political geography, its wheat-livestock agronomy and division of labour, and its comparatively advantageous location, close to the Americas and the ocean currents that would carry vessels to and fro.”
Moore’s argument will be picked up on the second page dealing with the Origin of Capitalism that is looking at Explanations.
Enclosure
This section looks at Enclosure, the most well known aspect of changing property rights and the creation of a propertyless working class.
First the important ethic or ideology of ‘improvement’ will be looked at. To illustrate the role played by this idea in the enclosure movement Ellen Meiksins Wood (2002) looks at John Locke’s influential ideas regarding property and land.
The work of Ben Baack (1979) is then used to map out the main features and episodes of enclosure, before the account of Simon Fairlie examines in detail some of the main examples of enclosure, and the punitive measures taken to subdue the numerous acts of resistance amongst the population.
Improvement
Elsewhere in this Blog (on the Pre Political Economy Page) we saw that according to Robbins, Locke theorised that all people are surely entitled to the fruits of their own labour and can therefore keep in their ownership food they gather, prey they kill and land that they clear. This entitlement is subject to a few provisos; for example it is only legitimate to claim land when there is land enough for others to do the same; and only produce that can be used can be kept, such that things do not go to waste and decay.
Locke then says that as gold and silver do not decay, there can be no objection to use gold and silver – as money – to buy land and presumably other property originally produced by others. Consequently Locke must see that selling one’s surplus property to others is another legitimate way of using it before it decays. Robbins (106) is not sure of Locke’s logic here, but notes this as an ‘apologia bandied about in the political discussions of the eighteenth century’.
Finally Locke compounds his labour theory of property, says Robbins, by claiming that 90% of most commodities in advanced societies come from the labour applied to raw materials.
Meiksins Wood (109 –10) [later referred to simply as Wood] explores Locke somewhat further.
She positions his theories in the context of a society where moves to transform the nature of property appeared in court cases, as well as in individual property disputes over areas of common land. In these cases traditional property rights were opposed by the principles of ‘improvement’ that were often seen as legitimate by judges (Wood 109 -10).
She notes that similar ideas preceded Locke, but that he introduced several innovations supportive of developing agrarian capitalism. In her account Locke starts by claiming that the Christian God has given the Earth to men (people) in common, but that individuals can have property of particular things and that individual property is a God given right.
This is congruent with Robbins account where property can be exchanged for Gold and Silver. Wood continues to describe Locke’s view that men (people) own their own bodies and therefore own any item with which they have ‘mixed’ their labour such that it changes its natural condition.
The notion of ‘improvement’ is also central to Locke’s view of property, and throughout his discussion is the theme that the Earth is given to people to be made productive and profitable and that private property is therefore superior to traditional communal possession. Again it is pointed out that for Locke most of the potential value in land results from labour and improvement rather than from nature.
Wood (111) then establishes that Locke is thinking of value here; and not use-value, but exchange-value,
“Locke also makes it clear that the value he has in mind is notsimply use value but exchange value. Money and commerce are the motivation for improvement; and an acre of land in unimproved America, which may be as naturally fertile as an acre in England, is not worth 1 / 1 000 of the English acre ..”
Here she means land cultivated by a Native American, then valued and sold in Locke’s England. Wood adds,
“Locke’s point, which not coincidentally drips with colonialist contempt, is that unimproved land is waste, so that any man who takes it out of common ownership and appropriates it to himself- he who removes land from the common and encloses it – in order to improve it has given something to humanity, not taken it away.” (Wood 111)
While the idea that labour is the source of value and property sounds plain enough, it soon becomes clear that Locke has something more complicated in mind. Wood (112) quotes from Locke where he says,
“… the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digg’d in any place where I have a right to them in common with others, become my Property …”
It is therefore not just my own labour that constitutes my property; it can be the labour of my horse or my paid worker; and of course I can appropriate the labour of my employee in just the same way as I can appropriate land.
Wood (111 – 112) sees this as evidence that for Locke the crucial point is about the profitable use of labour, rather than the activity of labour itself. For example in the case of the Native American it was the profitability of the land and its exchange value that was at issue, rather than the labour that had been applied to the land.
So the use of labour to create exchange value is the basis of property for Locke, a key point for capitalist theory, and a distinctive aspect of Locke’s contribution to property theory. This position resonated both in enclosure at home and in the dispossession of indigenous people in England’s colonies,
“This had implications not only for domestic property relations but also, as we shall see, for the justification of colonial expropriation. It could be used to defend the enclosure of ‘unprofitable’ land at home, as well as territory in the colonies that was not being put to commercially profitable use by indigenous populations.” (Wood 112)
This is a very important insight. Locke’s proposals were simultaneously very useful ideologically to both colonists in the Americas – driving Native Americans off their lands – and to English land owners evicting peasants from newly enclosed common lands.
When considering these ideas, shaped and formed into such convenient support for the dispossession of so many people, one can perhaps understand better Robbins reference above, to ‘apologia being bandied about’.
Wood (Pages 112 to 115), sums up this section with a number of points.
First she points out that Locke’s views lead to today’s employers being seen as producers themselves, rather than those they employ to do the work; for example industrial disputes are often described as differences between the producers and the workers.
Second, his view that labour produces both value and profit make him the first thinker to articulate something very much like the capitalist process; only William Petty got close to this before him.
Thirdly, his views were convenient to the emerging agrarian capitalism around him, where large holdings of land became associated with high agricultural productivity.
Fourthly, his language of ‘improvement’ and ‘waste’ resonated with those times. The idea of agricultural improvement – especially coming from the Royal Society and from learned men with whom he and his mentor the Earl of Shaftsbury were closely involved – flourished in England in that time. And his repeated references to common land as ‘waste’ and his support for enclosures were very influential.
Fifthly, his ideas about property were the best arguments available for landlords seeking to enclose land and exclude commoners. A new capitalist definition of property was being established, both in theory and in practice, and there were 17th Century legal decisions using principles like Locke’s to replace customary land rights with exclusive property holdings.
Such decisions accelerated in the 18th Century when Parliamentary backing of enclosure spread and ‘improvement’ was cited systematically as reason enough to extinguish traditional rights.
Wood (108 – 109) also gives a brief description of the actual practices of enclosure. She describes how early enclosures were sometimes enacted with the cooperation of the peasant farmers themselves, but that enclosures in the 16th century provoked a wave of social disruption as alarm was voiced at the dispossessed ‘plague of vagabonds’ wandering the countryside. Because of the threat to public order Tudor sovereigns legislated to slow enclosure down, but the practice continued to cause conflict. Enclosure riots took place in the 16th and 17th century and the issue was a main grievance in the Civil War.
But the landed classes eventually shaped the state to suit their requirements and – with the support of the so called ‘Glorious Revolution of 1688 – a newer form of enclosure emerged in the 18th century when more and more enclosures were backed by Parliament.
It is useful here to consider the work of other writers who look in more detail at the actual consequences of enclosure for the mass of the population. It is very convenient for some to forget the worst abuses handed out to people in these times, on the basis that this was a historical process that enabled subsequent generations to enjoy benefits undreamt of before.
First some more contextual information from Baack (1979) will be useful. He too identifies two major periods of enclosure in England, or as he terms them ‘the reorganisation of property rights’.
The first happened in the Tudor Period – approximately 1485 to 1603 – and predominated in the highland, pastoral regions of England. A relatively few people farmed here looking after animal herds on land that was mostly held permanently in common.
The second, Parliamentary Enclosure period took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mainly in the arable, crop growing, regions with higher population levels where villages were surrounded by large open fields (Baack, P 63-64).
This difference had implications for the complexity of enclosure negotiations. In animal pasturing areas fewer numbers of herders made agreements easier and quicker to complete. In agrarian areas by contrast the much larger numbers of peasant farmers involved, all with several strips of land, meant that agreements could take years to complete, especially as such commoners would have been used to making collective decisions (P 67).
He also identifies more general factors affecting these decisions (P 66). First, by the beginning of the Tudor period, there seems to have been a general rise in population numbers, resulting in falling real wages and rising land values, the latter offering landowners higher returns after enclosure.
The second general issue was that of rising demand for wool and resulting price rises. It was argued, perhaps spuriously, that in response to this demand many pastures became overburdened as commoners tried to raise more sheep, leading to falling feeding capacity of their pasture land.
Private ownership by enclosure was seen to offer a solution to this problem as the new private farmers would be able to maximise their profits at a level that maintained the quality of pasture land and balanced their other input costs.
He then discusses (P 68-69) how, during a transfer of land, the commoners may not receive adequate compensation; in such instances a transfer of wealth would have taken place from the poorer farmers to the richer land owners. This occurred relatively infrequently in pastoral areas, but in agrarian areas cultivated fields were frequently converted into sheep pastures, leaving many former farmers without means of support. These situations could lead to discontent, resistance, riots and sometimes rebellion.
Baak describes enclosure in the Tudor period when there was enough agrarian discontent to provoke Government action, as the Tudor monarchs – not against enclosure in principle – were concerned to quieten the social strife and unemployment caused by it. From 1488 the Tudors passed a series of acts constraining the use of land following enclosures. For example, limits were placed on the number of sheep a person could own, and land was even turned back into common when an enclosure had caused depopulation. Violators against these laws were dealt with in the court of Chancery where they could be subject to fines. These laws had the effect of discouraging enclosures in agrarian areas, making them less straightforward and sometimes more costly, thus reducing the rate at which they took place.
As the Tudor period ended at the start of the 17th Century enclosures continued at this reduced rate. This continuation coincided with a reversal of the factors identified above; population levels ceased to rise, and wool prices fell such that a considerable amount of arable land in the midlands remained unenclosed by the end of the century (P 69 – 70).
The 17th century too saw the start of a transition in the enclosure movement. While the Tudors had tried to slow down enclosure, government now began to change its policy from hindrance towards support. The court of Chancery, rather than prosecuting violations by would-be enclosers, began to support and sanction privately arranged enclosures (P 70).
Enclosure thus became a more attractive financial proposition as government backed enclosures gave more confidence that changed property rights would be enforced, and that government would pick up some of the enforcement costs too (P 70 -71).
By the start of the 18th century other changes began to support the profitability of enclosure. Population began to grow again and markets expanded as foreign trade grew. Agricultural prices began a sustained rise as new techniques increased the output per worker. All of these changes resulted in a substantial increase in the value of land, which in turn raised the potential rents that could be secured through enclosure (P 71).
At the same time a standardised procedure was evolving, that simplified and promoted enclosure. Throughout the 18th century private parliamentary enclosure acts using such procedures grew in number. Up to 1760 Parliament passed 200 private acts enclosing some 300,000 acres of land. In the second 40 years of the century such acts and enclosed land increased tenfold. Further standardisation of rules and procedures culminated in government enaction of a series of General Enclosure Acts beginning in 1801.
These acts in effect established a uniform national procedure for enclosing land. (Baak P71 – 72).
He notes that most existing studies interpreting enclosure are based upon the assumption that private, exclusive ownership of land is more economically efficient than that where land is held in common ownership. (Baak, P 64).
With regard to actual exchanges of land ownership Baak tries to clarify the criteria in use when that is under consideration and, congruent with Wood’s account summarised above, he thinks it comes down simply to an economic calculation. That is, those seeking to enclose would anticipate a higher rent from the land after enclosing into private ownership, than that available under the common ownership arrangement (Baak, P64-65).
This first draft now turns to a consideration of Simon Fairlie’s ‘Short History of Enclosure’(2009).
Fairlie is less circumspect than Baak in his description of the Parliamentary Enclosures. Where earlier enclosures were normally motivated by the private interests of landowners seeking higher income, he argues that the purpose of the later round of enclosures was,
“…to increase efficiency and production and so both create and feed an increasingly large proletariat who would work either as wage labourers in the improved fields, or as machine minders in the factories.” Fairlie, 24.
That is, there was a dual motive by the State both to secure a general increase in output and simultaneously to create a class of people dependent on wage labour.
He describes how Prime Minister William Pitt set up a Board of Agriculture – not a Government department, but a board of ‘gentlemen’ mostly landowners – for the advancement of agriculture. This board set about publishing some 90 volumes of agricultural reports on all areas of England that repeatedly extolled the benefits of ‘improvement’ through enclosure, and argued that more enclosure must take place.
Fairlie argues that these reports amounted to State propaganda and that the resulting enclosure of huge tracts of land was nothing less than theft.
More than one member of the board recanted their views when they observed the consequences of these actions. For example Arthur Young – first secretary of the board – wrote his last report in 1801 describing the severe poverty that had been caused by enclosure in numerous villages. The report was disowned by the board.
Despite such concerns between 1760 and 1870 roughly 7 million acres – approximately one sixth of the area of England – were enclosed.
“Millions of people had customary and legal access to lands and the basis of an independent livelihood snatched away from them” (Fairlie 25).
But, before all this, Fairlie begins with an account of the earlier phase of enclosure,
“… as medieval England progressed to modernity, the open field system and the communal pastures came under attack from wealthy landowners who wanted to privatize their use. The first onslaught, during the 14th to 17th centuries, came from landowners who converted arable land over to sheep … Villages were depopulated and several hundred seem to have disappeared. The peasantry responded with a series of ill fated revolts. In the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, enclosure was an issue, albeit not the main one. In Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450 land rights were a prominent demand. By the time of Kett’s rebellion of 1549 enclosure was a main issue, as it was in the Captain Pouch revolts of 1604 -1607 when the terms “leveller” and “digger” appeared, referring to those who levelled the ditches and fences erected by enclosers. (P 20).
He then (20 – 21) quotes Thomas Moore the most celebrated dissenter against enclosure, from which this extract is taken. Complaining against enclosure and the import of multitudes of sheep that,
“… become so great devowerers and so wylde, that they eate up and swallowdown the very men themselfes. They consume, destroye, and devoure wholefields, howses and cities . . . Noble man and gentleman, yea and certeyn Abbottes leave no ground for tillage, thei inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down townes, and leave nothing standynge but only the churche to be made a shepehowse.”
Fairlie notes that death or execution was the fate of the rebel leaders listed above – Cade, Kett and Pouch (21) – but as he takes the issue of rebel leaders no further it is worth having a brief look at the fate of these men.
In Appendix 1, at the bottom of this page, these four rebellions are looked at a little closer.
Picking up Fairlie again, he next discusses the Diggers (21 – 22). He describes how this group came to notice during the English Revolution when, in 1649, Gerard Winstanly and his followers – the Diggers – began to cultivate land on St. George’s Hill, Surry, proclaiming a free Commonwealth.
This seems to have been an attempted reclamation by people who had already been turned off the land, rather than a resistance movement by peasants threatened with a current enclosure. Winstanly, a prolific pamphleteer, wrote that the Earth was a common treasury for the relief of all, both beasts and men, but that the land,
“… was hedged into Inclosures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves.”
and
“Take note that England is not a Free people, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures.”
Fairlie notes that the Diggers were not against enclosure as such – and made Fairfax, the army commander, aware of this – but merely wanted to create an enclosure of their own that would become the Commonwealth for all where commoners could hold land for their livelihood.
He also notes that Winstanley sometimes spoke the same language of ‘improvement’ as the normal enclosers, but he genuinely wished the poor to benefit from his project, rather than the wealthy. In any event, later in his life Winstanley became a Quaker, a church warden and a chief constable!
The Blacks (vigilante bands of commoners with sooted faces)
Fairlie describes how executions were suspended after the beheading of Charles 1 in 1649, but resumed by Judge Jeffries in the Bloody Assizes of 1686. These were held around the West Country to sentence the defeated Monmouth rebels, and where hundreds were condemned to be hanged and/or butchered, 800 were transported, many others died in prison and a female, Elizabeth Gaunt, became the last woman to be burned alive for political crimes.
Fairlie (22) clearly links the Bloody Assizes with Walpole’s Black Acts decades later, but is not precise on the nature of this association. Presumably he means that the large scale executions and other savage punishments of the assizes set a cultural precedent of how to deal with dissenters.
Therefore when faced with vigilante bands of commoners with sooted faces – as disguise and camouflage at night – carrying out increasingly daring acts of resistance and reprisal in response to the enclosure of woodlands, the door was open in 1723 to the Black Acts, that Fairlie calls,
“Without doubt the most viciously repressive legislation enacted in Britain in the last 400 years” (22).
Thus to squash the resistance of commoners – who had lost their rights to firewood, timber, game and grazing for pigs, and saw their commons crops eaten and trampled by landowners deer – prime minister Robert Walpole passed the 1723 Act that introduced the death penalty for more than 50 poaching related offences. These death penalties stayed on the statute books for nearly a hundred years, during which the Act was expanded to include 200 capital crimes – many with intensified punishment – and under which hundreds of people were hanged for taking wild meat.
As a result, dispossessed people trying to survive in the only way they knew how – by use of the land and its produce – were now subject to the death penalty. Even after the Acts were finally repealed, poachers and other minor offenders suffered transportation instead.
The Fens
Fairlie (22, 23) describes how people of the Fens also suffered the enclosure of their land. In the early 1600s Stuart monarchs, trying to raise money, appointed Dutch engineers (paid with allocations of drained and enclosed land) to drain large areas that would provide the crown with valuable arable land yielding higher revenues.
There was vigorous resistance from the commoners who complained that Parliament had been given false information about the nature of the fens. Rather than the valueless quagmire described, they argued that their land produced horses, great dairies, butter and cheese, flocks of sheep and crops that supported many thousands of cottagers that would be destitute if the enclosures proceeded.
The people fought back by rioting, by levelling dykes and by taking the engineers to court. Legal fees for the latter were raised by collections round the villages, but Charles 1 tried to prevent this by prosecuting those seen as ringleaders.
The outbreak of the Civil War in the 1640’s changed everything though; the engineering work was stopped, local big wigs were driven from the fens and the commoners reclaimed all the enclosed fenland.
The tables were turned though in the 1760s when drainage was again initiated, with the high price of corn helping arguments calling for more arable land. Despite resistance in the form of rick burning, pamphlets and riots, there was less solidarity amongst commoners this time, some seeming to prosper more than others.
Thus most of the fens were drained and enclosed by parliamentary acts between 1760 and 1840. Despite problems of the land drying out, forcing the installation of pumping systems, the area eventually became a highly productive area of arable land.
However, there can be no justification in hindsight for the large scale forced dispossession involved in such enclosure schemes or for the cruel and savage treatment handed out to those who dared to resist.
In the fens 300 acre land holdings without a single labourer’s cottage were not unusual, leading to the gang labour system still used to this day.
Small holdings were not completely driven out though, and so that in 1870 more than half of the resulting land holdings were less than 20 acres and the surviving smallholdings went on to play a valuable part in mitigating the hardships of the depression years of capitalism in the 1930s.
The Scottish Clearances
Fairlie (23, 24) then turns to the process whereby the Scottish Highlands were stripped of people. He describes the situation at the end of the 18th century where several factors drove the desire to secure more pastureland. First more land was needed to produce food for a rising population level. Secondly demand for English wool was being replaced by colonial cotton imported from America and India. And finally – sealing Scotland’s fate – that country, now united with England, offered large tracts of pastureland ready for the introduction of sheep.
In short, the resident population of clanspeople were forcibly driven from the land to be transported to Canada, taken to labour in Glasgow or made to pick kelp on Scotland’s west coast – the seaweed being needed in the soap and glass industries. The latter group would go on to form the nucleus of the crofting population.
People were given little option in this matter and if necessary they would be burnt out of their homes by the lairds ‘burning parties’ then driven away with only the clothes they stood up in. The highlands were left so bare of people that the whole process was lost from collective memory until many years later when the research of historians uncovered what had happened.
Fairlie’s account is corroborated by an article from Historic UK, (Stewart, T. ‘The Highland Clearances).
Stewart writes that the clearances were “an organized and intentional removal of the population” motivated by the landlords calculation that more money was to be made from sheep than from people.
Families who had lived for 500 years in the same cottages were turned out into the surrounding country. Many were relocated to the coast, some to work the land of others; given those options many chose to emigrate to Canada – but some were sold as indentured slaves.
At the height of the clearances up to 2000 cottages were burned each day to prevent the evicted from returning.
In the ten years from 1811 around 15000 people were removed from land owned by the Duchess of Sutherland and her husband. Some of the old and frail with nowhere else to go succumbed to the elements and froze or starved to death.
Tenants cleared from the isle of Rum were paid to embark to Canada, but every passenger on the ship ‘James’ had contracted typhus by the time they arrived. On the isle of Barra 1500 tenants were tricked into attending a meeting supposedly about land rents – only to be overpowered and forced onto a ship bound for America.
Stewart sums up by pointing out that the clearances of an estimated 70,000 people were a main contributor to the global Scottish Diaspora, and that they changed the nature of the Scottish Highlands forever.
The Verdict of Modern Historians
In an assessment of the modern view of enclosure amongst modern scholars Fairely writes that the dominant view – of 18th and 19th century enclosure – is that it was a necessary evil and that less harm would have been done if the increased agricultural wealth that resulted had been fairly shared.
He adds that all opponents of enclosure admit that it did hasten agricultural progress, and that all supporters of enclosure concede that it could have been carried out in a more equitable manner.
The desire for equitable shares expressed in such views is clearly unrealistic. The enclosure of land creates a small class of property owners who might need to employ former peasant farmers; but Adam Smith tells us that employees are paid a subsistence wage and all profitable proceeds belong to the employer.
A number of areas of contention remain. For example writers in the 1920’s argued that enclosure enabled innovations that hastened the ‘agricultural revolution’; but recent writers have pointed out that such innovations were taking place anyway throughout the preceding centuries under the open field system.
Another issue concerns the effect of enclosure on rural depopulation and the declining incidence of small scale farming. Some argue that these matters were happening anyway and often can’t be linked to enclosure. But a recent study of Northamptonshire indicated a direct link between enclosure and the disappearance of smallholders.
Whichever of these views one is drawn to, or to Fairlie’s view that enclosure was ‘downright theft’ or Marx’s view of coercion and violence – the fact remains that the rural population share of England and Wales dropped from 65% in 1801 to 23% in 1901. By contrast in France 59% were still rural in 1901 and 31% in 1931.
In terms of agricultural workers per area of land there was in 1935 one UK worker for every 12 hectares, in France the figure per worker was 4.5 hectares and in Europe as a whole, 3.5 hectares.
Fairlie (29) concludes that,
“Britain set out, more or less deliberately, to become a highly urbanized economy with a large urban proletariat dispossessed from the countryside”
and that,
“Enclosure of the commons, more advanced in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, was not the only means of achieving this goal”
In other words Britain, in moving from feudalism to capitalism, did not need to deliver such coercion, cruelty, disregard and impoverishment onto the mass of the people.
Summary
Despite the first draft nature of these 2 pages looking at the Origin of Capitalism a number of matters seem to be clear.
Progressively, over the course of nearly 4 centuries the mass of the people of England and other nations of Britain, millions of people, were persuaded, manipulated or forced to leave the land that had sustained them and their forbears for hundreds of years. There was little chance of consent involved.
This meant loss of livelihood, most likely loss of their homes, removal from the only life they knew – and a future uncertain in how they would be able to live. People had lost rights to firewood, timber, game and grazing for animals, and land for crops.
There were two major phases of this dispossession;
- the earliest ran from about 1480 to 1600 and was generally motivated by the anticipation that the Lord or other landlord would be able to charge a market rent higher than that decided by precedent an tradition
- the later phase supported by parliament ran from about 1700 and 1870, was motivated by arguments regarding ‘improvement’ leading eventually into a policy of greater agricultural productivity and the need for a propertyless class of people needing to work for wages
- Hundreds of villages disappeared from the countryside; some because they were no longer needed by the evicted villagers; others because they spoiled the view in the large private grounds of ‘country gentelmen’.
The ethic or ideology of ‘improvement’ used to justify these practices was also used in the colonies of the times as justification for the theft of land from indigenous people.
There are accounts of resistance ranging from damage to fences, ditches and other aspects of the enclosed farms, to demonstrations and riots and to large scale revolts. Bands of so called vagabonds roved the countryside; those detained for this offence – vagabondage – were whipped or branded (Rosten 1990, 7).
Tudor monarchs took steps to slow the rate of enclosures because they were concerned at the alarm and disruption caused by the protestors – not because they were concerned at the starvation and deprivation motivating the protests.
At the same time extremely punitive legislation was passed including the death penalty for some 50 poaching related offences; this was later expanded to 200 capital offences – many including intensified punishment. As a result hundreds were hanged for petty offences.
Those brave or desperate enough to join large scale revolts risked death in battle, or execution after defeat. Those deemed to be prominent were executed in the most vile and hideous manner.
If one accepts the view that finance and produce from the Americas were necessary for the birth of capitalism, then the unconscionable horrors of African Slavery and South American forced labour have to be added to the awful enough crimes of enclosure and dispossession.
It is plain that the introduction of capitalism was no peaceful or consensual process; it was carried out with cruelty, disregard and contempt for the mass of the people who would become the wage earning working class. The process cannot be retrospectively justified on the basis of subsequent events.
Appendix 1
In this Appendix a slightly closer look is taken at 4 of the major Peasant Revolts.
Peasant Rebellions
The Peasants Revolt of 1381
This uprising took place in the context of political tensions following the Black Death. The plague had killed many peasants leaving the survivors able to push for better conditions and higher rewards. (‘Wikiwand’ The Peasants Revolt’)
The state responded with Statutes designed to fix conditions at pre plague levels and to impose criminal status on those who dissented. In 1361 punishments of branding and imprisonment were introduced.
Some peasants had prospered due to opportunities stemming from labour shortages, but in 1363 new laws were introduced preventing them from buying expensive goods that were previously only available to the higher classes.
In 1381 the revolt started as a response to a Royal attempt to collect unpaid taxes. It quickly spread across the South East and included not only peasants but artisans and village officials. Court records were burned and local gaols broken open, the rebels demanded an end to serfdom, reduced taxes and removal of the 14 years old King Richard’s senior officials and law courts.
Led by Watt Tyler and the radical cleric John Ball, a force of the Kentish rebels marched on London, entered the city on 13 June, and was joined by many local residents. They set fire to law books and buildings in the Temple and killed anyone associated with the royal government.
The next day rebels entered the Tower of London and killed many high ranking officials; the same day Richard met the rebels at Mile End and agreed to most of their demands including an end to serfdom.
On 15 June Richard again met Tyler and his men, this time at Smithfield. This time Richard’s men killed Tyler, and a militia from the city began to disperse the rebels. Richard withdrew the grants he made to the rebels the previous day.
The rebellion had spread to East Anglia where many officials were killed in Cambridge. The unrest there was eventually put down on 25 or 26 June when the rebel army was defeated at the Battle of North Walsham.
But troubles had spread further north to York, Beverley and Scarborough, and to the west to Somerset. However Richard was able to mobilise 4000 soldiers to track down and subdue the rebels. In the end most of the leaders were caught and executed; by November at least 1500 rebels had been killed.
Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450
This account is based on Cavendish (2000). Fairlie points out that land rights were a prominent issue in this rebellion.
The rebels complained bitterly about taxes, corrupt officials and the idea that the monarch, Henry V1, was above the law.
In the June of 1450, 20,000 rebels – peasants, shopkeepers, craftsmen and more than a few gentry – appeared at Blackheath, crossed London Bridge to the City where they captured and executed the Lord Treasurer. Cade tried in vain to stop the rape, killing and looting that followed but these atrocities alienated some of his own followers and turned Londoners against the rebels.
The Lord Chancellor persuaded Cade to disband his force in return for official pardons, to be issued the following day. The rebels quickly dispersed, but about a week later Cade learned the Government were offering 1000 marks for him, dead or alive. He was soon captured and mortally wounded in the process. His body was taken to Southwark, butchered into quarters and the body parts subsequently displayed around the country as a warning to others.
But this did not stop further uprisings in Kent and elsewhere, all of them savagely put down.
Ketts Rebellion 1549
This account is drawn mainly from ‘Kett’s Rebellion in Norwich’ by Andy Wood, (2004).
In broad terms this rebellion started in Norfolk in early June 1549 when commoners broke fences that had been erected on their former common. On 6 July the same group led a wider attack on enclosures. On 9 July they attacked enclosures on the land of Robert Kett a wealthy tanner. Kett listened to their grievances sympathetically and offered to lead the rebels to try ‘to subdue the power of Great men’.
The rebels then marched without delay to Norwich picking up supporters as they walked. They skirted the town and on 12 July made camp on Mousehold Heath; but they had enough access to the town to imprison in the Castle a number of ’Gentlemen’ they had captured, and to Surry Place, which was to become Kett’s military headquarters.
From this situation Kett and his councillors kept order over the rebels, and drew up a list of complaints that were given to royal representatives who periodically visited the camp. Eventually negotiations deteriorated and the rebels seized the city on 22 July. In response two separate Armies were sent in turn to quell the rebellion.
The first, an army of only 1200 men under the Marquis of Northampton, was easily overcome by the rebels, who were said to number 20,000 men [an exaggerated figure (A. Wood, 5)].
Things changed however in late August with the arrival of the second stronger army of between 8 and 12,000 men led by the Earl of Warwick. This troop had a body of foreign mercenaries and mounted gentry, including many from Norfolk there to punish their wayward tenants.
Wood describes a linked incident that occurred on 24 August before hostilities started. On that day a King of Arms was sent to offer the rebels a pardon, and to be a go between in any necessary negotiations.
But Kett was not present when the herald arrived, so he was received by the collected rebels. Unlike others around the country they rejected the offered pardons, and unfortunately they treated the herald defiantly with truculence and lewd behaviour.
When Kett presently arrived it was too late. He met the harassed herald on his way back to his master, who advised Kett to regain control over his unruly men.
On learning what had happened Warwick ordered a barrage of the city, and three days and nights of fighting through the streets of Norwich began. As the fighting raged the Royal forces were joined by a thousand fresh mercenaries; the exhausted and hungry rebels retreated to the low flat valley of Dussingdale just beyond Mousehold . There they pitched stakes and awaited the inevitable attack.
After bombardments and cavalry charges the rebels collapsed in disarray. Wood describes the aftermath of the rebellion as involving ‘massive bloodshed’ (15), but only gives a brief description (10), as follows.
“Kett fled the site, only to be captured the following day. Many rebels had already been executed during the fighting within Norwich; after this crushing defeat further mass executions followed in the city. Meanwhile, Robert Kett was being interrogated at Norwich Castle. In November, he and his brother William were convicted of high treason in London, and returned to Norfolk. William was hanged from the tower of Wymondham Abbey, while Robert was suspended in chains from the walls of Norwich Castle on 7 December 1549.”
There are many other online accounts of the aftermath giving more detail of the events, but unfortunately these are blogs, history groups and town or family websites whose descriptions are hard to validate. Consequently some of these claims will simply be repeated here, to be treated with caution.
As a result of the battle some 3000 rebels are said to have been killed, and a similar number captured. One quite large group stayed on the battlefield and formed a near impregnable defensive formation. After several offers of a pardon if they surrendered, they only accepted this offer when Warwick himself came over and repeated it himself.
Robert Kett was captured as Wood reported, but his brother was also captured with him. Executions took the whole of the following day in several public places in Norwich. Warwick is said to have finally called a halt to them as he was aware that these men were required to work the land.
In the end hundreds were executed that day, including nine of the bravest fighters who were singled out to be hung, drawn and quartered. The battlefield group promised a pardon by Warwick the day before were amongst those executed.
While this was going on both Robert and William Kett were being interrogated under torture in Norwich castle. They were indeed transported to the Tower of London where they were tried for treason, found guilty and sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.
Instead they were taken back to Norwich where Robert was chained, placed in a gibbet and hung from the castle walls where onlookers were able to watch his slow death that took many days, or even weeks. His brother William was deal with in a similar manner at Wymondham Abbey. Their rotting corpses were left hanging long after their deaths as a warning that people should not disobey.
Wood attributes two different types of cause to Kett’s rebellion. First in very general terms the rebellion was located within a very extensive situation of social disruption and uprisings called the ‘commotion time’ that originated in the spring of 1549.
Thus by the time of Kett’s rebellion commoners in a large number of English counties had already rebelled against the feudal authorities. Most of these, however, had been subdued in a relatively quiet manner, either by negotiation or sometimes by force.
These ‘commotions’, says Wood (13 and 14,) while expressing underlying conflicts in Tudor society, were triggered by government measures to dampen down illicit and overzealous enclosures. These policies emboldened the peasantry and led to large scale destruction of enclosures and demonstrations against wider agrarian and urban grievances. There were thus numerous armed demonstrations supporting measures to suppress enclosure, sometimes also expressing concern at the enforcement of Reformation policies that were also underway.
Kett’s rebellion differed, though, from other armed insurrections in the attitude to offers of pardon. Kett and his men declined to have anything to do with such offers, and as we have seen Kett’s men treated royal envoys with bawdy disrespect.
The second more direct cause cited by Wood (19) consists of conflict due to attempts by landowners to enclose common fields, to increase rents, to extend deer parks and import flocks of sheep; all these things undercutting the livelihood of commoners and destroying the culture of their agrarian community.
The Tudors therefore, while legislating to ameliorate the social disruption caused by enclosure (see above), did not shrink from the bloodthirsty killing or butchery of those openly resisting the practice.
The Midland Rebellion,1604 to 1607; led by Captain Pouch
Mcdonagh and Daniels (2012, 15 and 16) describe the forms of action opposing enclosure taken by Northamptonshire commoners throughout the 16th century. This included hedge breaking to give cattle access to grazing land; filling of ditches to hamper re-enclosure; impounding livestock; gathering of firewood and other resources to which they previously had free access; trespass in parks and warrens; and even ploughing up land that the enclosers had converted to pasture.
Many of these practices are recorded in the Star Chamber and Chancery Courts, where records of commoner groups attempting to prosecute landowners over illegal enclosures were made.
The Midland Rising – or Captain Pouch Rebellion – of 1607, therefore followed a hundred years of small scale resistance. The rising again focussed on hedges and ditches around villages just north of Kettering, for example Newton, where land had been enclosed for sheep pasture in the previous ten years or so.
The following account of the rising is drawn from the ‘Newton Rebels’ website.
1607 was only a few years into the reign of James 1, a Stuart King. People were having a difficult time; the weather was bad, the population level was rising and food was hard to find. Discontent grew from the start of May. May Day had traditionally been the start of the season when cattle were permitted to graze in nearby Rockingham forest – but no more.
The discontent spread through Northamptonshire into Leicestershire and Warwickshire, throughout the month. The Royal Authorities became anxious on hearing about this as there also reports of gatherings of 3000 at Hillmorton near Rugby and 5000 at Cotesbach in Leicestershire. A gibbet was set up in Leicester city, but it was torn down by the people.
During this time the terms Diggers and Levellers began to be used for the first time. The Diggers of Warwickshire issued this proclamation,
“Wee, as members of the whole, doe feele the smarte of these incroaching Tirants, which would grind our flesh upon the whetstone of poverty, and make our loyall hearts to faint with breathing, so that they may dwell by themselves in the midst of theyr heards of fatt weathers.”
More than a thousand men, women and child commoners from the Rockingham area had gathered near Newton, led by a ‘strangely anonymous’ person calling himself Captain Pouch. He claimed to have authority from heaven and contents in his pouch that would protect his followers from harm.
By the end of May, a Royal proclamation was issued expressing concern at the large gatherings of riotous commoners and requiring that ‘sharper remedies’ should be taken to quell the unrest. As the Lord Lieutenant of Northamptonshire was away in London, the task fell to the Deputies made up of the local gentry. These included the families of Montague, Mildmay, Tresham, Brudenell, and Spencer. Of these, Tresham seemed to be very unpopular by the commoners, while Montague seemed more sympathetic to them – having spoken of their hardships in Parliament.
However, none of the armed bands of local men loyal to these families would act against the commoners, so a troop of ordinary servants was pulled together. The confrontation took place at Newton in June 8, 1607. The rebels were ordered to disperse, but they refused to comply. The King’s proclamation was read to them twice, but still the commoners ignored them.
The gentry and their followers then charged the rebels and reportedly killed 40 people. Numerous men and women were taken as prisoners and imprisoned in the local church. The leaders, including Captain Pouch (whose pouch was found to contain nothing but cheese), were singled out.
This group of men were then executed by being hung, drawn and quartered; their body parts were displayed around Northamptonshire towns and villages, to warn as many people as possible of the consequences of disobedience.
The survivors of the killings were given a Royal Pardon, subject to certain conditions that were largely ignored by the commoners. Details of this episode, says the website, are hard to find; Parish records went missing and Assize records were burned. As a result little was known locally about the rebellion until recently when activists dug out information from books and academic papers.
Profit, Wealth and Value 