The Collapse

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with the manorial lord. Those who do not own labor service or marriage fines are “free men”.

Free men are not under reign of the manorial lord, so they are mainly not the subject of manorial records in which we draw most of our understanding of the agrarian arrangements of the day. If the rights of a free man are impeded upon, he can bring a lawsuit upon the breacher at the royal court, or appeal to the royal justices who travel around the country.

Those that fall under the manorial court are unfree tenants, including villeins and customary tenants.⁸³ These tenants are presented at the court/village meetings when community matters are discusses in which bylaws are issued on common grazing and cropping affairs.⁸⁴ When disputes arise, villagers were able to serve as jurors and pledges.⁸⁵ Hence, these types of participation, gives some extent of legitimacy to the lord’s court and village meetings.

2.2.3 The Collapse

Why did the British common fields system fail? And how?

The first and foremost reason is the enclosure movement. The term “enclosure” actually has three meanings to it: “[1]The enclosure of the great open fields characteristic of midland agriculture;[2] the enclosure of regular town of village commons;[3] the nibbling away of forest, moor, and other waste land…”.⁸⁶ The situation in the third meaning has already been happening since the increase of population from 12-14^th centuries.⁸⁷ By the 13^th century, most of the best land has been taken, which leaves naturally lesser arable land left to develop.

This implications of this last activity is least impacting to other peasants.

However, the situation of the second meaning, the enclosure of the town or village

83 According to Dyre, “villein” meant “an unfree tenant, holding by a servile tenure”, or in other words, in a

“villeinage”. A “customary tenant” is a person holding land under the customs of a manor. This means that such a holding is enforced through the manorial lord’s court, excluding common law, and the person is considered under servitude. “Neif”, is a person born into servility. See Dyre, 2002, p. 140.

84 Dyre, 2002, p. 142.

85 Dyre, 2002, p. 145.

86 John Clapham. 1949/1963. A Concise Economic History of Britain: From the Earliest Times to 1750. London:

Cambridge University Press, p. 194

87 Ibid., p. 123.

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commons, will affect gravely the many that live day-to-day on the commons. These rights on the commons may include grazing rights for their husbandry animal, rights to gather firewood, or fodder, turf, clay, etc..⁸⁸ These resources were essential to villagers for their daily livelihoods: grazing of oxen for plows and wood as the resource of heat and cooking. Not having access to these critical resources would severely interrupt the peasant life. Two royal statues have already been issued in the 13^th century—Merton in 1235 and Westminster in 1285—in which both permitted manorial lords to enclose waste lands as long as there are sufficient lands left for other peasants to exercise their common rights.⁸⁹ This second meaning of enclosure was part of the main cause of the Great Rising of 1381.⁹⁰ Angry peasants ganged together to tear down the fences of enclosed land of the wealthier gentry during the unrest. Moreover, enclosing the commons was the direct cause of many other peasant revolts, like Kett’s Rebellion in 1549. Due to the built-in power-asymmetry, monitoring and sanctions become moot when the violator is the lord himself, or the landed gentry who have lots of money and associates themselves with the aristocracy.

The first meaning of enclosure, acquiring strips of open land, was also in motion, but done in another fashion—purchase. Especially in the non-midland areas like east and southwest England where land markets were more active and prevalent, the consolidation of land via purchase was already existent even before the Black Death of 1348-1350. After the Black Death, the significant loss of population due to plague brought down crop prices, labor wages soared, and land became abundant again. During this time, living conditions improved for peasants due to shortage of labor, but land grab became extravagant, especially in East Anglia, but throughout the Midlands as well to a lesser extent.

Another expansion of population came in the later part of the 15^th century, more and

88 Larry Patriquin, 2007. Agrarian Capitalism and Poor Relief in England, 1500-1860. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 48.

89 Clapham, 1949, p. 123; Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas. 1973. The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History. London; New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 63.

90 Clapham, 1949.

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more the fabrics of the traditional feudal society, grounded on land, obligations, and communalism, began to give away to a capitalist’s way of functioning.⁹¹ The relationship founded on land and service between the lord and servant became a relationship linked by wage and labor between the capitalist and laborer. Falling real wages and rising crop prices towards the end of the 16^th century brought on another wave of enclosure movement.⁹² In 1560, around 12% of English peasants made a living by employment because they did not have a farm. This number has raised to somewhere around 40-50% in 1630.⁹³ This growing body of wage workers was evicted from their customary landholdings and was forced to make a living (find a wage-paying job) in a time when real wages are falling. Hence, poverty and suffering were widespread.⁹⁴ The Midland Revolt of 1607 in Newton, Northamptonshire (part of the Midlands) was such example of the building agony and grievances of the peasants at the time.

The English society became accustomed to the capitalist ways of economics by during 1650-1750, thus, the social relations of capitalist production were becoming dominant even in the agrarian sector.⁹⁵ Especially after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the crown was weaker and could not act to guard peasant rights like in the Stuart and Tutor years,⁹⁶ the enclosure movement became much more pervasive and merciless. Customary peasants were driven out of their cultivating landholdings for the landlord to turn cropping land into grazing land for pursue of the rising wool price. By 1750, at least half of the population in England had little or no land to make a living, and thus lived off wages from employment. By 1790, the “independent peasant class, producing their own subsistence with their own labor on their

91 North and Thomas, 1973.

92 North and Thomas, 1973; Patriquin, 2007.

93 Richard Lachmann. 1987. From Manor to Market: Structural Change in England, 1536-1640. Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press., p. 17.

94 Patriquin, 2007, p. 59.

95 William Lazonick, 1974. “Karl Marx and Enclosures in England.” Review of Radical Economics 6 (2): 1-59.

96 Barrington Moore. 1966/1993. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press.

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own land, was almost extinct”.⁹⁷

Finally, enclosures enacted by Acts of Parliament (in the 18^th and 19^th centuries) enclosed 40% of land in the communal farming, or champion/Midland, regions, which was extremely more than any other region.⁹⁸ The enclosure movement peaked from around 1760-1820s and basically stopped after 1832, totally transforming the English countryside.⁹⁹ The Midland areas were the most heavily impacted, accounting for over a third to a half of the effected regions of the whole country.¹⁰⁰ Without the right to the common waste, or the right to cultivate their own landholdings, peasants could not live on the farms. Those that had no right of property and legal protection were evicted at the lord’s will, but those that did have some property protection could take the lord to the king’s court and put up a fight.

However, few won. Resistance by force was also responded by force.¹⁰¹ And after the Civil War, the Parliament won. The result was a Parliament representing the like-minded capitalist landed aristocrats and gentry successfully limiting the power of the Crown. No more could the King’s court pity the peasants.¹⁰² This was a total reverse and complete overhaul in traditional rights given to the peasants. The central and local level governments denied traditional rights originally allocated to the peasants, let along their rights for communal governance and rule making; moreover, the bigger enterprise/institution of feudalism (in which the common fields were nested and embedded within) and power relations between the crown versus the aristocracy and landed gentry have changed largely over the centuries.¹⁰³

The situation of the peasantry in the Midland area was dire. When the enclosures enacted by Acts of Parliament went into force, evicted peasants were thrown into a society no longer operating on the traditional/agrarian understanding of making a living on land and a

97 Lazonick, 1974 p. 23.

98 Hopcroft, 1999, p.79.

99 Moore, 1966, p. 25.

100 Moore, 1966, p. 26.

101 Hopcroft, 1999.

102 Moore, 1966, p. 12.

103 Margaret Levi. 1988. Of Rule and Revenue. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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basic living style of autarky. They were thrown into a society with economic model based on a labor-wage relationship. With hardly any skills to work in a labor-divisional market, they were skill-less and could but join the swelling ranks of the proletariat swarming into the cities at the turn of the Industrial Revolution.

However, such situations were not as dire in other regions of England.