"Capitalist Fence"
This is what stone fences between ancient enclosures in England look like today. Photo by Chris Wimbash
"A certain man planted a vineyard, surrounded it with a fence, dug a pit for a winepress, and built a watchtower. He rented the vineyard to winegrowers, and he himself went to foreign lands."
Mark Gospel 12:1
Mark Gospel 12:1
stories by stories. “But why is the fence capitalist?” one of the VO readers asked me in his comment to the article. "Golden Years". Studying at the Institute. But this is really interesting: why in the Middle Ages, as well as in New Age England, the “fence”, that is, the enclosure of land plots, was of a capitalist nature, while in France at the same time there was no hint of capitalism. So it took the Great French Bourgeois Revolution for it to penetrate into the village and agrarian relations there. After all, the feudal class was there and here. Sheep were bred for wool everywhere. And even in hot Spain, famous for its merino sheep. So what’s the matter here?
To answer this question, let us begin by recalling what forms of land tenure existed in England on the eve of enclosure?
The textbook on the history of the Middle Ages said a lot about feudal relations and their crisis. But... a lot does not mean clear and understandable. Why then, even at the institute, not everyone could answer the question of why it was in England that "the fence was capitalist", but not in France! Moreover, the information in it was presented in such a way that I, for example, believed for a long time that all knights' castles were exactly like that. Although in reality this was far from true and depended very much on the era. Illustration from the textbook by E. V. Agibalov and G. M. Donskoy (1966)
In general, before the enclosure in England, the following forms of land tenure existed: a manor, which was divided into two parts - a domain and holdings. Initially, England had a manor (community), but then, after 1066, part of the manorial lands were transferred directly to the lords, and the manor received the patronage of the lord. Which, in fact, was the meaning of the Norman conquest. The domain was owned by the lord, since it was given to him by the king. At the same time, he could dispose of it at his own discretion. Holdings were leased. To whom? Well, here: copyholders (who received a document - a "copy"), leaseholders (who were short-term tenants), freeholders (free holders, close to private owners), cottagers (land-poor peasants who worked for hire). Some took a lot of land, others (cottagers) could take nothing at all, and only paid for the right to pasture on the land of the feudal lord or community. The most common form of tenure in the XNUMXth and early XNUMXth centuries was copyhold, which got its name from the custom by which the name of the holder and the terms of the tenure were entered into the minutes of the manorial court, and the holder was given a copy of it, which was the right to hold the land. The so-called freeholders of the land, if they were asked by what right they owned the land, usually answered like this: "By the custom of the manor and the will of the lord." However, he could not produce any document to confirm his words!
But the diagrams explaining the structure of a typical feudal estate in this textbook were very good!
And then Mother Nature intervened in human affairs. First, the "black death" swept across Europe, making labor, firstly, a scarce material, and secondly, a sharp cold snap began, which required warm woolen clothing. The first to understand "where the wind was blowing from" were the inhabitants of small Flanders, where they began to produce cloth in large quantities. But cloth required raw materials - sheep's wool, and where in the Netherlands could you graze sheep in sufficient quantities? But England was nearby, where sheep farming was developed. From there, Flemish cloth makers began to receive wool, the price of which began to slowly but steadily rise! This means that it became more profitable for landlords to produce wool, not wheat. But wool production does not require so many workers. But workers are needed in cloth production, and, by the way, why sell raw materials when finished cloth costs much more?
The landlords figured this out very quickly, taking advantage of the fact that in the 16th century the rights of copyholders were very fragile. The fact is that the conditions for holding a copyhold were recorded in the 14th–15th centuries, during the liberation of the peasants from serfdom, and became a custom of the manor. But at the same time, it was not recorded in any documents. Just a custom!
And, yes, landlords could not drive copyholders off the land. However, a copyholder was only a hereditary or lifelong holder of his plot, but was not its owner, and paid the lord a feudal rent for it, usually in money. When transferring this plot as an inheritance to his children, selling or exchanging it, he had to ask the lord's permission to do so and also pay him a certain fee. And the rise in the cost of wool led to the fact that landowners began to increase both rent and other payments, which led to the breakdown of traditional forms of hereditary holding. According to Harrison, the author of "A Description of Britain", published in 1578,
"The landlords doubled, tripled, sometimes increased the fee for allowing peasants to own property when receiving an inheritance, forcing copyholders to pay large fines and loss of tenure for every trifle."
After that, the lord had every right to add the land of the copyholders to his own holdings, and if necessary, to profitably give it to the leaseholders or simply... enclose it. This is how enclosure began in England, and since "fencing" meant turning public land into the private property of the landlord, in England it could be considered "capitalist". Moreover, the courts, as a rule, decided disputes between peasants and feudal lords in favor of... the peasants (!), but only if they could show a document of ownership of the land. And if he said that he owned the land "by the custom of the manor and the will of the lord", then he was told that "the lord is the master of this land, and his will to own the land that you cultivated has come to an end!"
And then a diagram showing the fruits of fencing...
The process, as they say, began and in England it can be divided into three periods. The first: 1485-1520. The arable lands of the community were enclosed with hedges or ditches. The second: 1530-1550. The secularization of monastic lands was carried out. They were enclosed especially zealously in the central regions, as well as in the north and southeast of England. The third: 1550-1640. Enclosure slowed down somewhat, because too much land had already been enclosed. Now even half-acre plots were enclosed. In addition, in 1563 the government, in which stupid people always outnumber smart ones, completely banned enclosure. However, this can also be understood if you consider how many vagabonds and beggars appeared in England at that time. For example, under Elizabeth Tudor, there were 50 thousand vagabonds in London out of 200 thousand residents. But since this law was still practically not observed by anyone, in 1593 the government and parliament repealed the 1563 act against enclosures.
What happened in England as a result: the peasants, having lost their land, became hired workers, and some became vagabonds and beggars, for whose care the country began to collect money by law. Entire villages became deserted. The rural population began to migrate to the cities, which is very similar to the current situation in our country, isn’t it? A new layer of rural bourgeoisie grew up. Farming developed, oriented towards the market and using hired labor.
True, there were also freeholders in England - freeholders. They paid the lords a small rent for land plots and had the right to freely dispose of them. But the freeholders made up only a very small part of the English peasantry.
Karl Marx was also interested in enclosure and wrote about it in the first volume of Capital, Chapter 24:
"The great feudal lords, who stood in the sharpest antagonism to the royal power and parliament, created an incomparably more numerous proletariat by usurping the common lands and driving the peasants from the land to which the latter had the same feudal right of ownership as the feudal lords themselves. The immediate impetus for this in England was the flourishing of the Flemish woolen manufacture and the associated rise in wool prices. The old feudal nobility was swallowed up by the great feudal wars, and the new one was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all forces. The transformation of arable land into pasture for sheep became the slogan of the feudal lords."
Yes, but what about the second part of the question? Why wasn't the fence capitalist in France, and why wasn't there any enclosure there, since it's even closer to Flanders than England? Wool can be transported there by land!
To better understand all the circumstances, let us look again at the 6th grade textbook on the history of the Middle Ages, published in 1966. It contains two excerpts from two documents on the situation of serfs in France. And they say, first of all, that everything that happened there... was documented. And first of all, the voluntary (I emphasize!) transition of the peasant into serfdom from the feudal lord was documented. Crop failure, epidemics, showdowns among the nobility, robbery by bandits - all this plunged the average French peasant into poverty, close to destitution. And he could only hope for his feudal lord, who was interested in giving him a loan of grain, and a horse for plowing, and protecting him from the raids of robber knights, hiding him in the castle from enemies and, again, allowing him to earn money in his own castle. The peasant signed a document by which both he and his land passed into the hands of the feudal lord. But at the same time, the peasant's ownership of his land was not questioned.
Here are the two excerpts from the documents mentioned above. These are examples of how in France, and not only there, every "little thing" was recorded, not to mention the transition from one social status to another!
As a result, even if the French feudal lord wanted to drive the peasant off his land and enclose it with "his fence", he could not do this, because in court the peasant would present a deed of transferring himself and his land under the authority of the lord, but nothing more. He could not even sell the peasant, either with or without the land, if this was not spelled out in the contract. And it turned out that the French feudal lord reluctantly looked at his more fortunate English colleagues, but according to the law he could do nothing.
It took a bourgeois revolution to kill or drive out the nobles, and the peasants would remain on their land, but would be freed from feudal duties. That is why in France the fence on the land never became capitalist.
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