From Marxists Internet Archive
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Twenty-Seven: 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 sub-feudatories.
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 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 civilization 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 farm-steads, 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 laud. 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
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 to-day 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 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 be driven to them in quest of places and employment.
This is the way in which the engrossing of
farms naturally operates. And this is the way in which, for many years, it has
been actually operating in this kingdom.” [22]
He sums up the effect of the enclosures thus: “Upon the whole, the
circumstances of the lower
ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From little
occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of day-labourers and hirelings;
and, at the same time, their subsistence in that state has become more
difficult.” [23] In fact,
usurpation of the common lands and the revolution in agriculture accompanying
this, told so acutely on the agricultural labourers that, even according to
Eden, between 1765 and 1780, their wages began to fall below the minimum, and to
be supplemented by official poor-law relief. Their wages, he says, “were not
more than enough for the absolute necessaries of life.”
Let us hear for a moment a defender of enclosures and an opponent of Dr.
Price. “Not is it a consequence that there must be depopulation, because men
are not seen wasting their labour in the open field.... If, by converting the
little farmers into a body of men who must work for others, more labour is
produced, it is an advantage which the nation” (to which, of course, the
“converted” ones do not belong) “should wish for ... the produce being
greater when their joint labours are employed on one farm, there will be a
surplus for manufactures, and by this means manufactures, one of the mines of
the nation, will increase, in proportion to the quantity of corn produced.” [24]
The stoical peace of mind with which the political economist regards the most
shameless violation of the “sacred rights of property” and the grossest acts
of violence to persons, as soon as they are necessary to lay the foundations of
the capitalistic mode of production, is shown by Sir F. M. Eden, philanthropist
and tory, to boot. The whole series of
thefts, outrages, and popular misery, that accompanied the forcible
expropriation of the people, from the last third of the 15th to the end of the
18th century, lead him merely to the comfortable conclusion: “The due
proportion between arable land and pasture had to be established. During the
whole of the 14th and the greater part of the 15th century, there was one acre
of pasture to 2, 3, and even 4 of arable land. About the middle of the 16th
century the proportion was changed of 2 acres of pasture to 2, later on, of 2
acres of pasture to one of arable, until at last the just proportion of 3 acres
of pasture to one of arable land was attained.”
In the 19th century, the very memory of the connexion between the
agricultural labourer and the communal property had, of course, vanished. To say
nothing of more recent times, have the agricultural population received a
farthing of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which between
1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by parliamentary devices presented to
the landlords by the landlords?
The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population
from the soil is, finally, the so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the
sweeping men off them. All the English methods hitherto considered culminated in
“clearing.” As we saw in the picture of modern conditions given in a former
chapter, where there are no more independent peasants to get rid of, the
“clearing” of cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers do not
find on the soil cultivated by them even the spot necessary for their own
housing. But what “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies, we
learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland.
There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude
of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (in Ireland landlords have
gone to the length of sweeping away several villages at once; in Scotland areas
as large as German principalities are dealt with), finally by the peculiar form
of property, under which the embezzled lands were held.
The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which was the owner of
the land on which it was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or
“great man,” was only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen
of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the English
government succeeded in suppressing the intestine wars of these “great men,”
and their constant incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans
by no means gave up their time-honored trade as robbers; they only changed its
form. On their own authority they transformed their nominal right into a right
of private property, and as this brought them into collision with their
clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king of England might
as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman. [25]
This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers
of the Pretender, can be followed through its first phases in the writings of
Sir James Steuart [26] and James
Anderson. [27] In the 18th century
the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to
driving them by force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. [28]
As an example of the method [29]
obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of
Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well instructed in economy, resolved,
on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole
country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like
kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820
these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and
rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned
into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with
the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut,
which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of
land that had from time immemorial
belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres
on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time
lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the
nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent
of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for
her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep
farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English
farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by
131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to
live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English author
says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both. [30]
But the brave Gaels must expiate yet more bitterly their idolatry, romantic
and of the mountains, for the “great men” of the clan. The smell of their
fish rose to the noses of the great men. They scented some profit in it, and let
the sea-shore to the great fishmongers of London. For the second time the Gaels
were hunted out. [31]
But, finally, part of the sheep-walks are turned into deer preserves. Every
one knows that there are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of
the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London aldermen. Scotland is
therefore the last refuge of the “noble passion.” “In the Highlands,”
says Somers in 1848, “new forests are springing up like mushrooms. Here, on
one side of Gaick, you have the new forest of Glenfeshie; and there on the other
you have the new forest of Ardverikie. In the same line you have the Black
Mount, an immense waste also recently erected. From east to west — from the
neighbourhood of Aberdeen to the crags of Oban — you have now a continuous
line of forests; while in other parts of the Highlands there
are the new forests of Loch Archaig, Glengarry, Glenmoriston, &c. Sheep were
introduced into glens which had been the seats of communities of small farmers;
and the latter were driven to seek subsistence on coarser and more sterile
tracks of soil. Now deer are supplanting sheep; and these
are once more dispossessing the small tenants, who will necessarily be driven
down upon still coarser land and to more grinding penury. Deer-forests [32]
and the people cannot co-exist. One or other of the two must yield. Let the
forests be increased in number and extent during the next quarter of a century,
as they have been in the last, and the Gaels will perish from their native
soil... This movement among the Highland proprietors is with some a matter of
ambition... with some love of sport... while others, of a more practical cast,
follow the trade in deer with an eye solely to profit. For it is a fact, that a
mountain range laid out in forest is, in many cases, more profitable to the
proprietor than when let as a sheep-walk. ... The huntsman who
wants a deer-forest limits his offers by no other calculation than the extent of
his purse.... Sufferings have been inflicted in the Highlands scarcely less
severe than those occasioned by the policy of the Norman kings. Deer have
received extended ranges, while men have been hunted within a narrower and still
narrower circle.... One after one the liberties of the people have been cloven
down.... And the oppressions are daily on the increase.... The clearance and
dispersion of the people is pursued by the proprietors as a settled principle,
as an agricultural necessity, just as trees and brushwood are cleared from the
wastes of America or Australia; and the operation goes on in a quiet,
business-like way, &c.” [33]
The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the
State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and
clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under
circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of
primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture,
made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries
the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat.
Footnotes
1.
“The petty proprietors who cultivated their own fields with their own hands,
and enjoyed a modest competence.... then formed a much more important part of
the nation than at present. If we may trust the best statistical writers of that
age, not less than 160,000 proprietors who, with their families, must have made
up more than a seventh of the whole population, derived their subsistence from
little freehold estates. The average income of these small landlords... was
estimated at between £60 and £70 a year. It was computed that the number of
persons who tilled their own land was greater than the number of those who
farmed the land of others.” Macaulay: “History of England,” 10th ed.,
1854, I. pp. 333, 334. Even in the last third of the 17th century, 4/5 of the
English people were agricultural. (l. c., p. 413.) I quote Macaulay, because as
systematic falsifier of history he minimises as much as possible facts of this
kind.
2.
We must never forget that even the serf was not only the owner, if but a
tribute-paying owner, of the piece of land attached to his house, but also a
co-possessor of the common land. “Le paysan (in Silesia, under Frederick II.)
est serf.” Nevertheless, these serfs possess common lands. “On n’a pas pu
encore engager les Silésiens au partage des communes, tandis que dans la
Nouvelle Marche, il n’y a guère de village où ce partage ne soit exécuté
avec le plus grand succès.” [The peasant ... is a serf.
... It has not yet been possible to persuade the Silesians to partition the
common lands, whereas in the Neumark there is scarecely a village where the
partition has not been implemented with very great success] (Mirabeau:
“De la Monarchie Prussienne.” Londres, 1788, t. ii, pp. 125, 126.)
3.
Japan, with its purely feudal organisation of landed property and its developed petite
culture, gives a much truer picture of the European middle ages than all
our history books, dictated as these are, for the most part, by bourgeois
prejudices. It is very convenient to be “liberal” at the expense of the
middle ages.
4.
In his “Utopia,” Thomas More says, that in England “your shepe that were
wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become
so great devourers and so wylde that they eate up, and swallow downe, the very
men themselfes.” “Utopia,” transl. by Robinson, ed. Arber, Lond., 1869, p.
41.
5.
Bacon shows the connexion between a free, well-to-do peasantry and good
infantry. “This did wonderfully concern the might and mannerhood of the
kingdom to have farms as it were of a standard sufficient to maintain an able
body out of penury, and did in effect amortise a great part of the lands of the
kingdom unto the hold and occupation of the yeomanry or middle people, of a
condition between gentlemen, and cottagers and peasants.... For it hath been
held by the general opinion of men of best judgment in the wars.... that the
principal strength of an army consisteth in the infantry or foot. And to make
good infantry it requireth men bred, not in a servile or indigent fashion, but
in some free and plentiful manner. Therefore, if a state run most to noblemen
and gentlemen, and that the husbandman and ploughmen be but as their workfolk
and labourers, or else mere cottagers (which are but hous’d beggars), you may
have a good cavalry, but never good stable bands of foot.... And this is to be
seen in France, and Italy, and some other parts abroad, where in effect all is
noblesse or peasantry.... insomuch that they are inforced to employ mercenary
bands of Switzers and the like, for their battalions of foot; whereby also it
comes to pass that those nations have much people and few soldiers.” (“The
Reign of Henry VII.” Verbatim reprint from Kennet’s England. Ed. 1719. Lond.,
1870, p. 308.)
6.
Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 134. “The quantity of land assigned (in the old laws)
would now be judged too great for labourers, and rather as likely to convert
them into small farmers.” (George Roberts: “The Social History of the People
of the Southern Counties of England in Past Centuries.” Lond., 1856, pp.
184-185.)
7.
“The right of the poor to share in the tithe, is established by the tenour of
ancient statutes.” (Tuckett, l. c., Vol. II., pg. 804-805.)
8.
William Cobbett: “A History of the Protestant Reformation,” § 471.
9.
The “spirit” of Protestantism may be seen from the following, among other
things. In the south of England certain landed proprietors and well-to-do
farmers put their heads together and propounded ten questions as to the right
interpretation of the poor-law of Elizabeth. These they laid before a celebrated
jurist of that time, Sergeant Snigge (later a judge under James I.) for his
opinion. “Question 9 — Some of the more wealthy farmers in the parish have
devised a skilful mode by which all the trouble of executing this Act (the 43rd
of Elizabeth) might be avoided. They have proposed that we shall erect a prison
in the parish, and then give notice to the neighbourhood, that if any persons
are disposed to farm the poor of this parish, they do give in sealed proposals,
on a certain day, of the lowest price at which they will take them off our
hands; and that they will be authorised to refuse to any one unless he be shut
up in the aforesaid prison. The proposers of this plan conceive that there will
be found in the adjoining counties, persons, who, being unwilling to labour and
not possessing substance or credit to take a farm or ship, so as to live without
labour, may be induced to make a very advantageous offer to the parish. If any
of the poor perish under the contractor’s care, the sin will lie at his door,
as the parish will have done its duty by them. We are, however, apprehensive
that the present Act (43rd of Elizabeth) will not warrant a prudential measure
of this kind; but you are to learn that the rest of the freeholders of the
county, and of the adjoining county of B, will very readily join in instructing
their members to propose an Act to enable the parish to contract with a person
to lock up and work the poor; and to declare that if any person shall refuse to
be so locked up and worked, he shall be entitled to no relief. This, it is
hoped, will prevent persons in distress from wanting relief, and be the means of
keeping down parishes.” (R. Blakey: “The History of Political Literature
from the Earliest Times.” Lond., 1855, Vol. II., pp. 84-85.) In Scotland, the
abolition of serfdom took place some centuries later than in England. Even in
1698, Fletcher of Saltoun, declared in the Scotch parliament, “The number of
beggars in Scotland is reckoned at not less than 200,000. The only remedy that
I, a republican on principle, can suggest, is to restore the old state of
serfdom, to make slaves of all those who are unable to provide for their own
subsistence.” Eden, l. c., Book I., ch. 1, pp. 60-61, says, “The decrease of
villenage seems necessarily to have been the era of the origin of the poor.
Manufactures and commerce are the two parents of our national poor.” Eden,
like our Scotch republican on principle, errs only in this: not the abolition of
villenage, but the abolition of the property of the agricultural labourer in the
soil made him a proletarian, and eventually a pauper. In France, where the
expropriation was effected in another way, the ordonnance of Moulins, 1571, and
the Edict of 1656, correspond to the English poor-laws.
10.
Professor Rogers, although formerly Professor of Political Economy in the
University of Oxford, the hotbed of Protestant orthodoxy, in his preface to the
“History of Agriculture” lays stress on the fact of the pauperisation of the
mass of the people by the Reformation.
11.
“A Letter to Sir T. C. Bunbury, Bart., on the High Price of Provisions. By a
Suffolk Gentleman.” Ipswich, 1795, p. 4. Even the fanatical advocate of the
system of large farms, the author of the “Inquiry into the Connexion between
the Present Price of Provisions,” London, 1773, p. 139, says: “I most lament
the loss of our yeomanry, that set of men who really kept up the independence of
this nation; and sorry I am to see their lands now in the hands of monopolising
lords, tenanted out to small farmers, who hold their leases on such conditions
as to be little better than vassals ready to attend a summons on every
mischievous occasion.”
12.
On the private moral character of this bourgeois hero, among other things:
“The large grant of lands in Ireland to Lady Orkney, in 1695, is a public
instance of the king’s affection, and the lady’s influence... Lady
Orkney’s endearing offices are supposed to have been — fœda labiorum
ministeria.” (In the Sloane Manuscript Collection, at the British Museum, No.
4224. The Manuscript is entitled: “The character and behaviour of King
William, Sunderland, etc., as represented in Original Letters to the Duke of
Shrewsbury from Somers Halifax, Oxford, Secretary Vernon, etc.” It is full of
curiosa.)
13.
“The illegal alienation of the Crown Estates, partly by sale and partly by
gift, is a scandalous chapter in English history... a gigantic fraud on the
nation.” (F. W. Newman, “Lectures on Political Economy.” London, 1851, pp.
129, 130.) [For details as to how the present large landed proprietors of
England came into their possessions see “Our Old Nobility. By Noblesse
Oblige.” London, 1879. — F. E.]
14.
Read, e.g., E. Burke’s Pamphlet on the ducal house of Bedford, whose
offshoot was Lord John Russell, the “tomtit of Liberalism.”
15.
“The farmers forbid cottagers to keep any living creatures besides themselves
and children, under the pretence that if they keep any beasts or poultry, they
will steal from the farmers’ barns for their support; they also say, keep the
cottagers poor and you will keep them industrious, &c., but the real fact I
believe, is that the farmers may have the whole right of common to
themselves.” (“A Political Inquiry into the Consequences of Enclosing Waste
Lands.” London, 1785, p. 75.)
16.
Eden, l. c., preface.
17.
“Capital Farms.” Two letters on the Flour Trade and the Dearness of Corn. By
a person in business. London, 1767, pp. 19, 20.
18.
“Merchant Farms.” “An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of
Provisions.” London, 1767, p. 11. Note.— This excellent work, that was
published anonymously, is by the Rev. Nathaniel Forster.
19.
Thomas Wright: “A Short Address to the Public on the Monopoly of Large
Farms,” 1779, pp. 2, 3.
20.
Rev. Addington: “Inquiry into the Reasons for or against Enclosing Open
Fields,” London, 1772, pp. 37, 43 passim.
21.
Dr. R. Price, l. c., v. ii., p. 155, Forster, Addington, Kent, Price, and James
Anderson, should be read and compared with the miserable prattle of Sycophant
MacCulloch in his catalogue: “The Literature of Political Economy,” London,
1845.
22.
Price, l. c., p. 147.
23.
Price, l. c., p. 159. We are reminded of ancient Rome. “The rich had got
possession of the greater part of the undivided land. They trusted in the
conditions of the time, that these possessions would not be again taken from
them, and bought, therefore, some of the pieces of land lying near theirs, and
belonging to the poor, with the acquiescence of their owners, and took some by
force, so that they now were cultivating widely extended domains, instead of
isolated fields. Then they employed slaves in agriculture and cattle-breeding,
because freemen would have been taken from labour for military service. The
possession of slaves brought them great gain, inasmuch as these, on account of
their immunity from military service, could freely multiply and have a multitude
of children. Thus the powerful men drew all wealth to themselves, and all the
land swarmed with slaves. The Italians, on the other hand, were always
decreasing in number, destroyed as they were by poverty, taxes, and military
service. Even when times of peace came, they were doomed to complete inactivity,
because the rich were in possession of the soil, and used slaves instead of
freemen in the tilling of it.” (Appian: “Civil Wars,” I.7.) This passage
refers to the time before the Licinian rogations. Military service, which
hastened to so great an extent the ruin of the Roman plebeians, was also the
chief means by which, as in a forcing-house, Charlemagne brought about the
transformation of free German peasants into serfs and bondsmen.
24.
“An Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions,
&c.,” pp. 124, 129. To the like effect, but with an opposite tendency:
“Working-men are driven from their cottages and forced into the towns to seek
for employment; but then a larger surplus is obtained, and thus capital is
augmented.” (“The Perils of the Nation,” 2nd ed. London., 1843, p. 14.)
25.
l. c., p. 132.
26.
Steuart says: “If you compare the rent of these lands” (he erroneously
includes in this economic category the tribute of the taskmen to the clanchief)
“with the extent, it appears very small. If you compare it with the numbers
fed upon the farm, you will find that an estate in the Highlands maintains,
perhaps, ten times as many people as another of the same value in a good and
fertile province.” (l. c., vol. i., ch. xvi., p. 104.)
27.
James Anderson: “Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National
Industry, &c.,” Edinburgh, 1777.
28.
In 1860 the people expropriated by force were exported to Canada under false
pretences. Some fled to the mountains and neighbouring islands. They were
followed by the police, came to blows with them and escaped.
29.
“In the Highlands of Scotland,” says Buchanan, the commentator on Adam
Smith, 1814, “the ancient state of property is daily subverted.... The
landlord, without regard to the hereditary tenant (a category used in error
here), now offers his land to the highest bidder, who, if he is an improver,
instantly adopts a new system of cultivation. The land, formerly overspread with
small tenants or labourers, was peopled in proportion to its produce, but under
the new system of improved cultivation and increased rents, the largest possible
produce is obtained at the least possible expense: and the useless hands being,
with this view, removed, the population is reduced, not to what the land will
maintain, but to what it will employ. “The dispossessed tenants either seek a
subsistence in the neighbouring towns,” &c. (David Buchanan:
“Observations on, &c., A. Smith’s Wealth of Nations.” Edinburgh, 1814,
vol. iv., p. 144.) “The Scotch grandees dispossessed families as they would
grub up coppice-wood, and they treated villages and their people as Indians
harassed with wild beasts do, in their vengeance, a jungle with tigers.... Man
is bartered for a fleece or a carcase of mutton, nay, held cheaper.... Why, how
much worse is it than the intention of the Moguls, who, when they had broken
into the northern provinces of China, proposed in council to exterminate the
inhabitants, and convert the land into pasture. This proposal many Highland
proprietors have effected in their own country against their own countrymen.”
(George Ensor: “An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations.” Lond,.
1818, pp. 215, 216.)
30.
When the present Duchess of Sutherland entertained Mrs. Beecher Stowe, authoress
of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” with great magnificence in London to show her
sympathy for the Negro slaves of the American republic — a sympathy that she
prudently forgot, with her fellow-aristocrats, during the civil war, in which
every “noble” English heart beat for the slave-owner — I gave in the New
York Tribune the facts about the Sutherland slaves. (Epitomised in part by
Carey in “The Slave Trade.” Philadelphia, 1853, pp. 203, 204.) My article
was reprinted in a Scotch newspaper, and led to a pretty polemic between the
latter and the sycophants of the Sutherlands.
31.
Interesting details on this fish trade will be found in Mr. David Urquhart’s
Portfolio, new series. — Nassau W. Senior, in his posthumous work, already
quoted, terms “the proceedings in Sutherlandshire one of the most beneficent
clearings since the memory of man.” (l. c.)
32.
The deer-forests of Scotland contain not a single tree. The sheep are driven
from, and then the deer driven to, the naked hills, and then it is called a
deer-forest. Not even timber-planting and real forest culture.
33.
Robert Somers: “Letters from the Highlands: or the Famine of 1847.” London,
1848, pp. 12-28 passim. These letters originally appeared in The Times.
The English economists of course explained the famine of the Gaels in 1847, by
their over-population. At all events, they “were pressing on their
food-supply.” The “clearing of estates,” or as it is called in Germany,
“Bauernlegen,” occurred in Germany especially after the 30 years’ war, and
led to peasant-revolts as late as 1790 in Kursachsen. It obtained especially in
East Germany. In most of the Prussian provinces, Frederick II. for the first
time secured right of property for the peasants. After the conquest of Silesia
he forced the landlords to rebuild the huts, barns, etc., and to provide the
peasants with cattle and implements. He wanted soldiers for his army and
tax-payers for his treasury. For the rest, the pleasant life that the peasant
led under Frederick’s system of finance and hodge-podge rule of despotism,
bureaucracy and feudalism, may be seen from the following quotation from his
admirer, Mirabeau: “Le lin fait donc une des grandes richesses du cultivateur
dans le Nord de l’Allemagne. Malheureusement pour l’espèce humaine, ce
n’est qu’une ressource contre la misère et non un moyen de bien-être. Les
impôts directs, les corvées, les servitudes de tout genre, écrasent le
cultivateur allemand, qui paie encore des impôts indirects dans tout ce qu’il
achète.... et pour comble de ruine, il n’ose pas vendre ses productions où
et comme il le veut; il n’ose pas acheter ce dont il a besoin aux marchands
qui pourraient le lui livrer au meilleur prix. Toutes ces causes le ruinent
insensiblement, et il se trouverait hors d’état de payer les impôts directs
à l’échéance sans la filerie; elle lui offre une ressource, en occupant
utilement sa femme, ses enfants, ses servants, ses valets, et lui-même; mais
quelle pénible vie, même aidée de ce secours. En été, il travaille comme un
forçat au labourage et à la récolte; il se couche à 9 heures et se lève à
deux, pour suffire aux travaux; en hiver il devrait réparer ses forces par un
plus grand repos; mais il manquera de grains pour le pain et les semailles,
s’il se défait des denrées qu’il faudrait vendre pour payer les impôts.
Il faut donc filer pour suppléer à ce vide.... il faut y apporter la plus
grande assiduité. Aussi le paysan se couche-t-il en hiver à minuit, une heure,
et se lève à cinq ou six; ou bien il se couche à neuf, et se lève à deux,
et cela tous les jours de la vie si ce n’est le dimanche. Ces excès de veille
et de travail usent la nature humaine, et de là vient qu’hommes et femmes
vieillissent beaucoup plutôt dans les campagnes que dans les villes.” [Flax
represents one of the greatest sources of wealth for the peasant of North
Germany. Unfortunately for the human race, this is only a resource against
misery and not a means towards well-being. Direct taxes, forced labour service,
obligations of all kinds crush the German peasant, especially as he still has to
pay indirect taxes on everything he buys, ... and to complete his ruin he dare
not sell his produce where and as he wishes; he dare not buy what he needs from
the merhcants who could sell it to him at a cheaper price. He is slowly ruined
by all those factors, and when the dirct taxes fall due, he would find himself
incapable of paying them without his spinning-wheel; it offers him a last
resort, while providing useful occupation for his wife, his children, his maids,
his farm-hands, and himself; but what a painful life he leads, even with this
extra resource! In summer, he works like a convict with the plough and at
harvest; he goes to bed at nine o’clock and rises at two to get through all
his work; in winter he ought to be recovering his strength by sleeping longer;
but he would run short of corn for his bread and next year’s sowing if he got
rid of the products that he needs to sell in order to pay the taxes. He
therefore has to spin to fill up this gap ... and indeed he must do so most
assiduously. Thus the peasant goes to bed at midnight or one o’clock in
winter, and gets up at five or six; or he gies to bed at nine and gets up at
two, and this he does every day of his life except Sundays. These excessively
short hours of sleep and long hours of work consume a person’s strength and
hence it happens that men and women age much more in the country than in the
towns] (Mirabeau, l. c., t.III. pp. 212 sqq.)
Note to the second edition. In April 1866, 18
years after the publication of the work of Robert Somers quoted above, Professor
Leone Levi gave a lecture before the Society of Arts on the transformation of
sheep-walks into deer-forest, in which he depicts the advance in the devastation
of the Scottish Highlands. He says, with other things: “Depopulation and
transformation into sheep-walks were the most convenient means for getting an
income without expenditure... A deer-forest in place of a sheep-walk was a
common change in the Highlands. The landowners turned out the sheep as they once
turned out the men from their estates, and welcomed the new tenants — the wild
beasts and the feathered birds.... One can walk from the Earl of Dalhousie’s
estates in Forfarshire to John O’Groats, without ever leaving forest land....
In many of these woods the fox, the wild cat, the marten, the polecat, the
weasel and the Alpine hare are common; whilst the rabbit, the squirrel and the
rat have lately made their way into the country. Immense tracts of land, much of
which is described in the statistical account of Scotland as having a pasturage
in richness and extent of very superior description, are thus shut out from all
cultivation and improvement, and are solely devoted to the sport of a few
persons for a very brief period of the year.” The London Economist of
June 2, 1866, says, “Amongst the items of news in a Scotch paper of last week,
we read... ’One of the finest sheep farms in Sutherlandshire, for which a rent
of £1,200 a year was recently offered, on the expiry of the existing lease this
year, is to be converted into a deer-forest.’ Here we see the modern instincts
of feudalism ... operating pretty much as they did when the Norman Conqueror...
destroyed 36 villages to create the New Forest.... Two millions of acres...
totally laid waste, embracing within their area some of the most fertile lands
of Scotland. The natural grass of Glen Tilt was among the most nutritive in the
county of Perth. The deer-forest of Ben Aulder was by far the best grazing
ground in the wide district of Badenoch; a part of the Black Mount forest was
the best pasture for black-faced sheep in Scotland. Some idea of the ground laid
waste for purely sporting purposes in Scotland may be formed from the fact that
it embraced an area larger than the whole county of Perth. The resources of the
forest of Ben Aulder might give some idea of the loss sustained from the forced
desolations. The ground would pasture 15,000 sheep, and as it was not more than
one-thirtieth part of the old forest ground in Scotland ... it might, &c.,
... All that forest land is as totally unproductive.... It might thus as well
have been submerged under the waters of the German Ocean.... Such extemporised
wildernesses or deserts ought to be put down by the decided interference of the
Legislature.”
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