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4.4 T HEORIZING THE C OLLAPSE OF THE B RITISH C OMMONS FROM A CPR V IEWPOINT
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In sum, the common fields system held on to function at large, before industrialization, because community councils, consisting of all the stakeholders who possess right to use the commons, were established to govern the collective use of both cropping, grazing, and other communal activities. Being in a pre-industrialized society with pre-modern bureaucracies in the Weberian sense, the common field system, governed by “shared norms and rules” of a community council with no modern sovereign state entity at the middle, has survived many centuries.
Having examined it bit by bit with Ostrom’s principles, we find that the British commons largely coincides with the 8 long-enduring CRP principles, even though the historical commons seldom permit “open access” characteristics. The commons is a robust institution because, according to Ostrom: “the appropriators designed basic operational rules, created organizations to undertake the operational management of their CPRs, and modified their rules over time in light of past experience according to their own collective-choice and constitutional-choice rules”.287 In this sense, the commons was rather a success in its time.
As Buck noted:
“Perhaps what existed in fact was not a “tragedy of the commons” but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years—and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era—land was managed successfully by communities.”288
4.4 Theorizing the Collapse of the British Commons from a CPR Viewpoint
However, Buck concluded her article with a rather interesting conclusion: “That the [commons] system failed to survive the industrial revolution, agrarian reform, and transfigured farming practices is hardly to be wondered at”.289 Buck seemed to view the
Ostrom, 2011. “Background on the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework”, The Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 7-27.
287 Ostrom, 1990, p. 58.
288 Buck, 1985, p. 60.
289 Buck, 1985, p. 60.
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common land as unfertile land and relevant agrarian practices as out of date, thus she believed that better husbandry practices replacing grazing practices on the commons and increase of agrarian output as a great progression of civilization.290 Thus, its ultimate demise was not to be pitied or regretted upon. However, Buck failed immensely to see what happened to the peasants whose livelihoods depended upon the system, even if it was outdated and seemed to deserve to be trashed away. How was it a “triumph” a minute before, then totally becoming a failed institution that failed to survive the next wave of events? This does not answer the question, but on the contrary, begs the question of “why” and “how”:
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…”.291 The situation in the third meaning has already been happening since the increase of population from 12-14th centuries.292 By the 13th century, most of the best land has been taken, which leaves naturally lesser arable land left to develop.
The implications of this last activity are least impacting to other peasants.
However, the situation of the second meaning, the enclosure of the town or village 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..293 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
290 Buck, 1985, pp. 59-60.
291 John Clapham. 1949/1963. A Concise Economic History of Britain: From the Earliest Times to 1750.
London: Cambridge University Press, p. 194
292 Ibid., p. 123.
293 Larry Patriquin, 2007. Agrarian Capitalism and Poor Relief in England, 1500-1860. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 48.
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statues have already been issued in the 13th 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.294 This second meaning of enclosure was part of the main cause of the Great Rising of 1381.295 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. In short, this was a clear erosion of Ostrom’s first principle: the boundaries and withdraw rights of the less privileged peasants have been changed without consensus on all sides, and clearly the sixth principle of “conflict-resolution mechanism” aren’t working effectively enough to resolve the conflicts within existing institutions due to the reason that manorial courts won’t likely stand against its own lord. 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 15th century, more and more the fabrics of the traditional feudal society, grounded on land, obligations, and
294 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.
295 Clapham, 1949.
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communalism, began to give away to a capitalist’s way of functioning.296 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 16th century brought on another wave of enclosure movement.297 In 1560, around 12% of English peasants lived on by employment because they did not have a farm. This number has raised to somewhere around 40-50% in 1630.298 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.299 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 1650-1750. Thus, the social relations of capitalist production were becoming dominant even in the agrarian sector.300 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,301 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 own land, was almost extinct”.302
296 North and Thomas, 1973.
297 North and Thomas, 1973; Patriquin, 2007.
298 Richard Lachmann. 1987. From Manor to Market: Structural Change in England, 1536-1640. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press., p. 17.
299 Patriquin, 2007, p. 59.
300 William Lazonick, 1974. “Karl Marx and Enclosures in England.” Review of Radical Economics 6 (2): 1-59.
301 Barrington Moore. 1966/1993. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press.
302 Lazonick, 1974 p. 23.
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Finally, enclosures enacted by Acts of Parliament (in the 18th and 19th centuries) enclosed 40% of land in the communal farming, or champion/Midland, regions, which was extremely more than any other region.303 The enclosure movement peaked from around 1760-1820s and basically stopped after 1832, totally transforming the English countryside.304 The Midland areas were the most heavily impacted, accounting for over a third to a half of the effected regions of the whole country.305 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 were evicted with ease, but those that did have some property/legal 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.306 And after the Civil War, a Parliament representing the like-minded capitalist landed aristocrats and gentry successfully limited the power of the crown. No more could the king’s court pity the peasants.307 This was a total reverse and complete overhaul in traditional rights given to the peasants. The central and local level governments deny 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.308
It is hard for any farmer, having only known how to crop all his life, be able to leave the land and live off skilled labor in exchange for a wage. This causes a huge surge in “poor relief”. Leicestershire, a parish in the Midlands, had a steady rise of poor relief rates that, by 1832, “nearly one half of the families in the village were in regular receipt of poor relief and
303 Hopcroft, 1999, p.79.
304 Moore, 1966, p. 25.
305 Moore, 1966, p. 26.
306 Hopcroft, 1999.
307 Moore, 1966, p. 12.
308 Margaret Levi. 1988. Of Rule and Revenue. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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many more receiving intermittent relief”.309 Only those young, unmarried, and skilled were able to work for the industrial employers, but only to find themselves joining a swarm of lowly-paid, overworked, brutally treated urban laborers. As scholars later observed, the enclosure movements have dissipated the English peasantry.310
In sum, as the high level constructs of power play edged institutionally to the capitalists-minded class of aristocrats and gentry and increasing international trade and increasing price of wool, land grab became inevitable and irreversible. For the poor thrones of customary peasants living on the common lands, without further legal or political support from the local or central level, they were “left out in the cold” with no avenue for institutional remedy. “Sheep ate man” was the result.311 This became the ultimate “tragedy” for those whose livelihoods depended on the commons.