Fencing
The problem of enclosures is one of the most interesting and still unsolved problems of the history of the initial accumulation of capital. The landlessness of the peasantry played an important role in the social and economic history of England in its transition to capitalism and the capitalist mode of production.
This work explores the process of early enclosures of the late XV and XVI centuries. They are interesting in that they represent the beginning of a profound revolution, which subsequently ended with the complete disappearance of the English peasantry as an independent class
The natural conditions of England are heterogeneous. So, while fertile plains and a mild climate are typical in the southeast, a hilly landscape prevails in the northwest, the climate is humid with harsh winds, and there are many good pastures, which led to the development of cattle breeding there.
At the end of the XV - beginning of the XVI century. England began the process of fencing and caused their important factors. For example, steady population growth (at the beginning of the 16th century, 2.5–3 million people, and by the end of it - 4.1 million), which increased the population’s needs for food. Also throughout the XVI century. in the village, the stratum of low-land peasants, rural hired workers — cottages — increased, and they, too, were buyers in the market. Another factor was price increases throughout the 16th century. At the beginning of the century, it was a consequence of the financial policy of the state and damage to the coin, which Henry VIII repeatedly resorted to. And from the middle of the XVI century. in England, as well as throughout Europe, a “price revolution” began to be felt, which caused a rise in prices for food and agricultural raw materials. It was still affected by the same demographic growth, and the market was sensitive to food shortages.
The increase in demand for grain and dairy products necessitated an adjustment to the situation. It was possible to adapt in two ways: by intensifying agriculture or by radical changes in the use of land. An increase in arable land, pasture for cattle, drainage of marshes, swamps, and the development of saline soils did not yield much result. They even used the transition from two-field and three-field to complex crop rotation using land under steam. However, these new practices came into conflict with community-based land use regulations. Therefore, England in the second half of the XV century entered a radical path - enclosures. 23 The main fences took place in the south, southeast and central part of the country.
The process of fencing was not limited to the 16th century. It was long and drawn out until the end of the 18th century.
The history of enclosures is divided into the following periods: 1. 1485 - 1520; 2.1530 - 1550; 3.1550 - 1640gg. (with a special sub-period during the 1590s and the beginning of the XVII century); 4. The era of the English bourgeois revolution; 5. XVIII century.
At the first stage, communal land plots and arable land captured by the Lords were fenced or fenced, and the fenced plots turned into pastures. It is worth noting that if in the XV - the first half of the XVI centuries. the fenced arable land was converted into a pasture for sheep, then in the second half they are engaged in agriculture on the fenced lands or they breed meat - dairy cattle. There are cases when fencing was carried out for the device of ponds for breeding valuable breeds of fish or hunting parks. The peasants now turned out to be unnecessary, since sheep farms needed less labor. As a result, the ousting of peasants-holders from the land begins, leading to the breaking of feudal relations in the English countryside and the agrarian coup: “... Thomas Simkinson from
During the first stage, a small part of the area was fenced.
The second wave of enclosures was stimulated by the secularization of monastic lands. Particularly increased fencing and evacuation in the southeast, in the central and northern regions in 1540. after the sale of secularized land. Most of these lands came into the hands of the local nobility, the court and official nobility, the gentry, the big bourgeoisie, a small part of the Yeomen. For the peasants, this land was inaccessible, as it was sold at a very high price.
The new owners of secularized land increased rents, feudal payments and rented land to prosperous peasants, townspeople who ran households on rented land, created capitalist farms, enclosed fields.
In the second half of the 16th century, the enclosures were less intensive, since it was necessary to master the occupied lands and the laws against enclosures partially interfered. However, few follow these statutes, therefore, when in 1593 the government and parliament repealed the act of 1563 against enclosures, then all the barriers were destroyed.
In the first half of the 17th century, the enclosures continued, and the government tried to restrain them, issuing orders to demolish the newly constructed hedges and fined the enclosures. As a result, this restored both the enclosures and the peasants, on whose shoulders fines fell, against the monarchy.
The scale, nature, forms of enclosures were diverse. Squares ranged from semi-acres to many hundreds of acres. Household plots, pastures, parks, forests, community lands for fencing were fenced. Enclosures, the driving out of peasants, the development of capitalist farming, and the price revolution led to enormous social consequences. The rapid decomposition of the feudal system was accompanied by the withering away of the familiar classes of peasants — holders and feudal lords — landowners. Conventionally, the population of the country of the XVI century can be divided into four categories: gentlemen, city dwellers, Yeomen, artisans and workers.
Gentlemen were the upper class, immediately following the king. These included princes, dukes, marquises, viscounts, barons, knights, esquires. It was impossible to be born a knight; people who had a certain property qualification were elevated to the knightly rank. The owner, possessing forty pounds of annual income, was required to accept a knighthood. Esquires, who were originally the squires of barons and knights, later turned into landowners. In addition, anyone who could live without labor and buy a noble rank and coat of arms could be called a gentleman. In the XVI century, there was an increase in the layer of rural gentlemen of the middle hand. The growth of cities, the success of international trade, the increasing demand for agricultural products created favorable conditions for enterprising rural owners. However, they were not satisfied with their previous income level. A significant mass of small middle nobility - the gentry saw a way out of the situation by abandoning traditional holders “according to custom”, who had long-term rights to their holdings and paid landlords depreciated fixed annuities. To increase revenues from ordinary holders, the new nobility used a wide variety of means: increasing rents, renegotiating the agreement, and repeatedly increasing files (fees for holding admission). As a result, rents have increased repeatedly. Of course, the goal of landlords when raising fines was to supplant ordinary holders, and since the process of "survival" was slow, ran into resistance, landlords resorted to radical measures - direct violence. It was more profitable to lease the vacated land to leaseholders, since the contract with them was concluded for a short time and gave land owners unlimited opportunities to increase rents. Often, landlords themselves took the land into their own hands, enclosed them and conducted their own farming on them, but more often they leased them to large farmers. The rent paid to the farmer was higher than traditional peasant payments, and the main thing was to increase the profitability of the land.
Citizens, in particular the wealthy, also actively used the lease, investing in the land the capital received from production and trade. Urban entrepreneurs also used the land for profit, renting it again or developing natural resources for them. Yeomen can be called farmers. They were free English, with an income of at least 6 pounds per year. Usually they had farms from gentlemen, worked, raised sheep, went to fairs. This prosperous peasantry became characteristic in the 16th century. the desire to break out of the framework of the rural community with its forced crop rotation and the "open fields" system. An increase in demand for sheep wool, and then for grain and meat, dairy products stimulated the yomen to switch to sheep husbandry and intensive farming. And in the conditions of the community, this was impossible because of a strictly defined share of cattle grazing on common lands and the preservation of the strip of land allotments. Therefore, the rich peasantry began to strive to withdraw their lands from the sphere of communal routines. This was achieved by exchanging plots, buying them up, “marriage contracts”, and sometimes by using force. As a result, the property was enclosed.
The fourth estate included those employed in agriculture, as well as people who did not have free land holdings, but only conditional, by agreement. Hence the word "copilgoder", i.e. "Copy holder". The enclosures affected them the most, the copilgodgers had practically no rights. Also in the English village there is still a small top of free peasants - freeholders. From their elite later came the capitalist farmers. There were also tenants — leaseholders holding land with the landlords on short-term leases and cotters — low-land peasants who worked for hire. The fourth estate also included artisans, factory workers, crowds of beggars, tramps, and robbers. Here is what Harrison writes in his book "Elizabethan England": "Regarding slaves ... - we don’t have those ... This fourth and last sort of people has no voice, no power in the state, but he himself does not control others. This class includes the crowds of our servants. ”
The expropriation of the peasants, which took place over two centuries, was supposed to lead, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, to the fact that only peasants remained on earth, who became small owners or capitalist farmers. The bulk of the forcibly driven ones turned into beggars, robbers and vagrants. People deprived of livelihood filled the roads of England. An expressive picture of all the calamities is given by Thomas More: “There is a relocation of the unfortunate: men and women, husbands, wives, orphans, widows, parents with small children ... They move ... from their usual and familiar places and do not know where to go; all the utensils that are inexpensive, even if she could wait for the buyers, they sell for a pittance, if necessary, to sell it. And when they quickly spend it in their wanderings, what else is left for them, how not to steal and get on the gallows according to their deserts or to wander and beggar? ... ”Already in 1956, in Wiltshire, the poor gathered in groups of 60 - 100 people. and take away grain on the roads from merchants. In 1597, crowds of hungry attacked wagons carrying bread in the harbor, and a whole ship with grain was captured near Lynn. However, the robbery was associated not only with the scope of the enclosures, but also with crop failures in 1594 - 1598. In the summer of 1596. food prices compared with 1593g. tripled. Wheat cost 7 shillings per bushel, the same amount of rye. In December, London cost 10 shillings per bushel in London, 12-15 shillings in Bristol, and 18 shillings in Shrewsbury. Prices have risen not so much due to lack of grain, but because of the activities of speculators, dealers and traders.
The peasants driven from the ground were the core of the people wandering along the roads of England. The sizes of vagrancy were undoubtedly very large, however, information about these sizes was practically not preserved. It is well known that under Elizabeth Tudor, there were 50,000 vagrants in London with 200,000 inhabitants. In addition, the army of people expelled from the earth was replenished with two more categories of the population. One of them appeared after the Rose War (1455 - 1485), when Henry VII was engaged in the destruction of military units that held large lords. This was necessary to prevent ongoing civil wars. The seniors were too weak to object, and peacetime required other peaceful pursuits. Armed units were unnecessary. For the most part, these were arrogant and war-hardened hooligans who did not cost anything to kill or rob. But there was another way, when the knights threw swords and became farmers, participating in the enclosure.
The third category appeared after the closure of monasteries in 1536 - 1539. Of course, some monks received pensions, but more went to nothing. By the way, it would be wrong to consider that monasteries and abbots did not engage in enclosures. There was practically no difference between spiritual and secular landowners.
We should pay attention to the peasants, who, after driving them away from the land, sought to find new income, namely, they became wage workers. Already from the middle of the XVI century. capitalist industry is growing, it is developing due to the expropriated peasants absorbed as labor.
The highest concentration of labor was observed in the second half of the 16th century. in the coal industry. Wage workers in the coal states of England appear in the middle of the XVI century. At the beginning of the 60s in England there were already 3-4 thousand miners and about 2 thousand workers engaged in transporting coal. At the end of the XVI century. the total number of workers in the mines reached 3.5 - 5 thousand people. In the early years of the XVII century. the number of miners rose to 21 thousand, and together with workers engaged in the transportation of coal, the army of workers reached 30 thousand people. A particularly sharp jump in the number of miners - coal miners occurred in the period from 1560 to 1600.
There is no doubt that, in particular, in the Northumberland and Durham coal basins, the working population was alien. The minority was composed of workers of local origin. Workers came to the north of England from Scotland, but basically they were expropriated in connection with the enclosures, peasants from the southeastern and central counties.
The new workers were not accepted by the local population as equals, because the peasants of the northern regions did not yet know what enclosures were and what they entailed. Locals regarded the newcomers as a lower class. For them, the ragged and vagabonds reaching for the mines were the dregs of society thrown out of their counties. They were hated, despised, looked at as competitors, taking their wages from honest people.
Only the Elizabethan Statute of 1563 laid the foundation for the compulsory collection of donations for the maintenance of the poor. This statute has more accurately defined measures in relation to people who do not want to pay tax on the poor. Unwanted was summoned to the next session to Justice of the Peace. Law of 1572 states that beggars over 14 years of age who do not have the right to collect alms are subjected to flagellation and branding at the first capture, at the second they are declared state criminals, and at the third they are executed. Also, under this law, each parish was made responsible for its poor, and anyone who received a poverty allowance could be sent to their place of birth. The justice of the peace could spend part of the funds raised by the poor to build work houses for the purchase of land, the inhabitants of which should work under pain of corporal punishment. Law of the Poor 1601 consolidated the existing practice and formed the basis of the self-taxation system in favor of the poor, work houses, parish welfare. This system existed until the industrial revolution destroyed it. Law 1576 ordered to open in each county two or three work houses, which were called correctional. They housed workable beggars and tramps. Funds for maintaining workhouses were taxed in favor of the poor.
The rules prevailing in the work houses can be called penal servitude, because lashes appear as punishment for all misconduct, and only one penny relied on the daily maintenance of the prisoner, while the caretaker received 12 pence.
The accumulation of homeless and impoverished people in cities was extreme and caused concern of the city authorities regarding public peace and all kinds of diseases. Therefore, city government seeks to protect the city from a further influx of the poor. Migrants were also undesirable for urban artisans. Indeed, in addition to turning entire neighborhoods into slums, they were also potential competitors to artisans - old-timers. The members of the workshops were crowded out by people without proper rights and without proper training.
The city authorities are beginning to demand high pledges from migrants who want to do craft within the city. In relation to London, special parliamentary decrees were issued, as a result of which the poor could not find refuge in it.
In 1597 A law was adopted to provide for the poor, distinguishing three kinds of poor people: the able-bodied, the children, the unworkable.
The working poor were prescribed by law to give work. Unwilling to work were punished. For the unemployed should build an almshouse. The costs of the poor were covered by the tax collected by the overseers. If one parish of the county was too burdened by the poor, then other parishes were also involved in the payment of tax. With the consent of two justices of the peace, the churchwarden and the overseer of the poor were entitled to teach, and in fact to serve the children of poor parents, whose consent was not asked.
At the same time, the law “On fraudsters, vagabonds and working poor” was issued. He repealed all previous laws on this issue, ordered the establishment of correctional houses and determined who should be assigned to the categories mentioned in the title of the statute. Incorrigible vagabonds were ordered to be imprisoned in correctional houses, sent to galleys for life, and expelled from England.
It began at the end of the XV century. the process of landlessness of the peasantry sharply exacerbated the social contradictions in the country. The resistance of the peasants by forced expropriation, their struggle for land took place in various forms. One of these forms was the numerous peasant lawsuits against the enclosures, which were the subject of legal proceedings in the Star Chamber and the Petition Chamber, various collective petitions appeared: “To His Highly Superior Highness the King. In humiliation and with tears, we announce and complain to your highness, we, your poor subjects ... recently, a certain John Pomer from Westangmering, Esq., Acquired this manor from your highness ... oppresses, disturbs and disturbs the subjects, copy-holders of this manor ... this John Pomer took away ... pastures ... and fenced ... these pastures along with other lands ... And after a short time ... by force and against their will took away from your poor subjects their homes, land, holdings and orchards, ravaged and demolished some of their houses ... and burned some of them forcibly expelled from your poor subjects from this seigneur ... ”Often litigations took a protracted nature. As a rule, justices of the peace decided the case in favor of those in power. But even if the justice of the peace decided the case in favor of the holders and decided to leave the fields open, the landlord continued to enclose. Another is the actions of peasants inside the manor: spoiling of hedges, grazing in fenced forests and parks. The spontaneous attacks on agents of the lord or royal officials in separate villages sometimes served as a prologue to the uprisings; local skirmishes could have developed into a mass movement in the current tense atmosphere. So, in particular, an uprising began in a small town of Louth in the northeast of Lincolnshire in 1536, which subsequently covered a large territory and threatened to spread to neighboring counties. Peasant unrest was caused by the secularization of monastic lands produced under the act of dissolution of 1536 (37 out of 51 monasteries were closed in Lincolnshire). The Lincolnshire rebellion erupted in early October. A crowd of peasants arrested the royal officials who arrived to take over the property of the abolished monastery, and the royal commission, located in the neighboring town, which was distributing the subsidy for the county. The very next day, neighboring villages were revolted.
The participants raised a banner symbolizing the loyalty of the Catholic Church. The petition program of the rebels included demands to end the dissolution, to punish Archbishop Kranmer and other bishops, supporters of the Reformation, to delay the payment of subsidies to the king.
In the era of initial accumulation, the transfer of land into the hands of new owners was accompanied by a breakdown of the existing system of land relations, a reduction in the rights of ordinary holders and small tenants, an increase in fencing, an increase in rents and fines, and the replacement of hereditary and lifelong forms of holding with short-term leases. Therefore, the demands to stop the secularization put forward in the petition program of the “Lincolnshire people”, drawn up by representatives of the clergy and the gentry who led the uprising, also reflected the interests of the peasantry, which sought to preserve the old land use system. Thus, the interests of the peasants, who constituted a large number of taxpayers, were met, in particular, by the clause on the deferral of payment of subsidies to the king. This explains the active participation of the peasantry in the uprising at all its stages.
After the suppression of the uprising in Lincolnshire, part of the peasant troops crossed to Yorkshire. The movement swept west and north Yorkshire, Westmoreland and Durham. The “five wounds of Christ”, a crucifix and a cup were depicted on the banner of the rebels, monks and priests walked in front of the rebels. After the capture of York, the uprising took the form of a religious demonstration (a campaign against London, dubbed the “Grace Pilgrimage”). However, the noble leaders of the uprising, having approached Doncaster, entered into lengthy negotiations with representatives of the royal government. Here a program document was adopted, consisting of 24 points, in which the captains of peasant detachments also took part in the voting. The king’s demagogic promises (including instructions to investigate complaints about enclosures and excessive rents and establish solid files), the noble leaders led to the cessation of the campaign. New outbreaks of the uprising of the Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmoreland peasants in January-February 1537 were quickly suppressed.
The main driving force of the Northern Uprising of 1536 was thousands of peasant detachments, a large place in the program of their uprising was occupied by the demands of the peasant communities, the main of their requirements were the fixing of parliamentary acts of payments for the resumption of holding and the implementation of the statutes against enclosing and seizing land. Thus, the social essence of the movement 1536-1537. lies in the struggle of the peasants for land, against undermining the foundations of peasant farming.
In the fall of 1547 - in the spring of 1548. The southern and central counties became the scene of peasant movements: Hertfordshire, Somersetshire, Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Essex, Surrey, Worcestershire, Sussex, Kent, Oxfordshire and Bershire. And in the summer of 1549, two large peasant uprisings broke out almost simultaneously: in the southwest (in Devonshire and Cornwall) and in East Anglia (the uprising of Robert Ket, or the "Norfolk Uprising").
The uprising in the southwestern counties, which began in June 1549, as well as the Northern Uprising in 1536, took place under religious slogans (for the old Catholic faith against the Reformation). The bulk of the participants in the movement were peasants who used typical peasant methods of struggle: attacks on noble estates, seizure of property and arson, destruction of land in fenced fields. In August, the uprising was crushed.
The peasant uprising, which began in July 1549 in Norfolk, was especially large after the uprising of Wat Tyler, where peasants of several villages destroyed the hedges established on communal lands by the lord of Manor. Soon, an uprising swept most of the county. At the head of the rebels, who sent to Norwich, small squires stood up - entrepreneurs Robert Ket and his brother William. The movement was attended by detachments of peasants from neighboring counties, as well as artisans and the urban poor of Norwich. In the rebel camp near Norwich, the Maushold petition was developed, comprising 29 articles. Although the unrest in the summer of 1549 covered more than half of the territories of England (Cornwall, Devonshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Herefordshire, Somersetshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Hampshire, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire) they did not united movement and were defeated by the government one by one.
The defeat of the mass movements of 1549 opened the way for the further expropriation of the peasantry. Separate outbreaks of peasant resistance took place in Kent in 1550, in Buckinghamshire and on the Isle of Wight in 1552, in Devonshire and Derbyshire in 1569 and a number of other places. The mass movement of peasants against the fence began in 1569 in the north and was used at the first stage by the local nobility for their political purposes. Interestingly, the vast majority of the participants in the uprising of 1569 were not the holders of the rebel feudal lords, but the peasants of the royal domain and secularized church possessions, who suffered from the growth of feudal payments and massive enclosures. The peasants refused to pay rent, destroyed hedges, smashed the estates of landowners, including representatives of the new nobility and large tenants, and destroyed manorial documents.
In England, before the industrial coup, there was a manor that was divided into two parts: domain and holdings. The lord could use the domain at his own discretion, while holdings were leased to copyholders, leaseholders (short-term tenants), freeholders (free holders close to private owners), cottages or cottages (low-land peasants who worked for hire). A common form of holding in the XV and early XVI centuries. there was a copyhold, which got its name from the custom, by virtue of which the holder’s name and conditions of holding were entered into the protocols of the manorial court, and the holder was given a copy from it, which was the right to hold the land. In the XVI century. copyholder rights were fragile. So, the lord had the right to attach the land of copyholders to his possessions and then it was more profitable for him to give it to leaseholders or to enclose. Subsequently, the Lords took advantage of the legal fragility of the rights of copyholders to increase the profitability of the land due to the falling price of money.
XVI century became the heyday of the new nobility or gentry (as far back as the 15th century the nobility was divided into new and old), which was able to take advantage of the new conditions and adapt itself to capitalist farming. The old nobility, living at the expense of feudal rents or service at the court of the king, lost its significance and remained largely in the western and northern counties. The core are the nobles of the middle hand. Here is what Hamlet says in Shakespeare’s drama about raising a gentry: “He has a lot of land, and is fertile; if the cattle own cattle, then his nursery will always be at the royal table ... "
The closure of monasteries and the secularization of their lands by Henry VIII gave a very big impetus to further enclosures. Through the purchase of monastic lands, seizures of communal lands and peasant allotments, the allotments of the new nobility grew. However, even before secularization, a group of gentlemen leased land from monasteries and even monastery churches.
The scope of the enclosures became very large and this could not but cause concern and concern of the government. The number of taxpayers has decreased, the country's defense ability has weakened. Not surprisingly, the British government was fighting an agrarian coup, despite the resistance of the new nobility. However, the statutes, commissions, laws did not have an effect, fencing continued. In 1549 Warwick legalized them, introducing the collective responsibility of the entire village for the destruction of hedges. Their destruction was equated with a criminal offense, and rebellious gatherings were punishable by death. In 1593 legislation against the restriction of enclosures was generally repealed. The government came into conflict with itself. On the one hand, the new nobility, capitalist farming, and on the other, hordes of ragged people, beggars, ready to go after any instigator of the uprising. Tramps and paupers were a formidable reminder of revolts like the Wat Tyler uprising and combustible material for unrest. Therefore, along with acts against the enclosures, cruel, bloody laws were issued that could not contain the wave of uprisings. But because of the strong differentiation within the peasantry, which still relied on community organization, the locality of these movements, limited by the size of one parish and district (the largest of them did not go beyond individual regions), the socio-economic unevenness of the country's development, the period of the Reformation, which had significance as a disconnecting factor due to religious differences, these movements did not become widespread, played practically no role and were quickly suppressed. The struggle of copy-holders and free-holders, and other layers for the land was unsuccessful.
The problem of enclosures is one of the most interesting and still unsolved problems of the history of the initial accumulation of capital. The landlessness of the peasantry played an important role in the social and economic history of England and the transition to capitalism and the capitalist mode of production.
This work explores the process of early enclosures of the late XV and XVI centuries. They are interesting in that they represent the beginning of a profound revolution, which subsequently ended with the complete disappearance of the English peasantry as an independent class
The natural conditions of England are heterogeneous. So, if fertile plains and a mild climate are characteristic in the southeast, then a hilly landscape prevails in the northwest, the climate is humid with harsh winds, and there are many good pastures, which led to the development of cattle breeding there.
At the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries, England began the process of enclosure and caused important factors. For example, a steady population growth (at the beginning of the 16th century, 2.5–3 million people, and by the end of it –4.1 million), which increased the population’s needs for food. Also throughout the XVI century. in the village, the stratum of low-land peasants, rural hired workers — cottages — increased, and they, too, were buyers in the market. Another factor was the rise in prices throughout the 16th century. At the beginning of the century, it was a consequence of the financial policy of the state and damage to the coin, which Henry VIII repeatedly resorted to. And from the middle of the XVI century. in England, as throughout Europe, a “price revolution” began to be felt, which caused a rise in prices for food and agricultural raw materials. It was still affected by the same demographic growth, and the market was sensitive to food shortages.
The increasing demand for grain and dairy products has made it necessary to adapt to the situation. There were two ways to adapt: \u200b\u200bintensification of agriculture or through radical changes in land use. Increasing arable land, cattle pasture, draining bogs, swamps, and developing saline soils did not yield much result. Even the transition from two-field and three-field to complex crop rotation using land was used. being under steam. However, these new practices came into conflict with community-based land use regulations. Therefore, in the second half of the 15th century, England entered the radical path - enclosures. 23 Most of the enclosures took place in the south, southeast, and central part of the country.
The process of fencing was not limited to the 16th century; it was lengthy and protracted until the end of the 18th century.
The history of enclosures is divided into the following periods: 1. 1485 - 1520; 2.1530 - 1550; 3.1550 - 1640gg. (with a special sub-period during the 1590s and the beginning of the 17th century); 4. The era of the English bourgeois revolution; 5. XVIII century.
At the first stage, communal land plots and arable land captured by the Lords were fenced or fenced, and the fenced plots turned into pastures. It is worth noting that if in the XV– first half of the XVI centuries. the fenced arable land was converted into a pasture for sheep, then in the second half they are engaged in agriculture on the fenced land or they breed meat - dairy cattle. There are known cases when fencing was carried out for the construction of ponds for breeding valuable breeds of fish or hunting parks. Peasants now turned out to be unnecessary, since sheep farms needed less labor. As a result, the ousting of peasant-holding peasants from the land begins, leading to the breaking of feudal relations in the English countryside and the agrarian coup: “... Thomas Simkinson from
During the first stage, a small part of the area was fenced.
The second wave of enclosures was stimulated by the secularization of monastic lands. Especially intensified fences and evictions in the southeast, central and northern regions in 1540. after the sale of secularized lands. Most of these lands came into the hands of the local nobility, the court ichinov nobility, the gentry, the big bourgeoisie, a small part of the Yeomen. For the peasants, this land was inaccessible, as it was sold at a very high price.
The new owners of secularized land increased rents, feudal payments and rented land to prosperous peasants, citizens who owned farms on rented land, created capitalist farms, enclosed the fields.
In the second half of the 16th century, fencing was more intensive, since it was necessary to master the occupied lands and partly prevented the laws against fencing. However, few followed these statutes, therefore, when in 1593 the government and parliament repealed the act of 1563 against enclosures, then all the barriers were destroyed.
In the first half of the 17th century, the enclosures continued, and the government tried to restrain them by issuing orders for the demolition of the newly built hedges and fine the enclosures. As a result, it restored both the enclosures and the peasants, on whose shoulders fines fell, against the monarchy.
The scale, nature, forms of enclosures were diverse. Areas ranged from a semi-acre to many hundreds of acres. Household plots, pastures, parks, forests, community lands for fencing were fenced. Enclosures, peasants, the development of capitalist farming, the price revolution led to huge social consequences. The rapid decomposition of the feudal building system was accompanied by the withering away of the familiar classes of peasants — holders and feudal lords — landowners. Conventionally, the population of the country of the XVI century can be divided into four categories: gentlemen, city dwellers, Yeomen, artisans and workers.
Gentlemen were the upper class, immediately following the king. These included princes, dukes, marquises, viscounts, barons, knights, esquires. It was impossible to be a knight, people who had a certain property qualification were elevated to the knighthood. The owner, possessing forty pounds of annual income, was required to accept a knighthood. Esquires, who were originally the squires of the barons and knights, later turned into landowners. In addition, the gentleman could be called anyone who had the opportunity to live without labor and buy a noble rank and coat of arms. In the XVI century, there was an increase in the layer of rural gentlemen of the middle hand. The growth of cities, the success of international trade, increased demand for agricultural products created favorable conditions for enterprising rural owners. However, they were not satisfied with their previous income level. A significant mass of petty middle nobility - the gentry saw a way out of the situation by refusing traditional holders “according to custom”, who had long-term rights to control and paid landlords depreciated fixed annuities. In order to increase revenues from ordinary holders, the new nobility used a variety of means: increasing rents, renewing the contract, and repeatedly increasing files (fees for holding admission). As a result, the sizes have grown repeatedly. Of course, the goal of landlords when raising fines was to oust ordinary holders, and since the process of "survival" was slow and ran into resistance, landlords resorted to radical measures - direct violence. It was more profitable to lease the vacated land to leaseholders, since a contract with them was concluded for a short time and gave landowners unlimited opportunities to increase rents. Often, landlords took the land into their own hands, enclosed them and kept their households on them, at night they leased them to large farmers. The rent paid to the farmer was higher than traditional peasant payments, and the main thing was to increase land profitability.
Citizens, in particular the wealthy, also actively used the lease, investing in the land the capital received from production and trade. City entrepreneurs also used land for profit, renting it out again or developing mining for them. Yeomen can be called farmers. They were free English, with an income of at least 6 pounds per year. Usually they had farms from gentlemen, worked, raised sheep, went to fairs. This prosperous peasantry became characteristic in the 16th century. the desire to break out of the framework of the rural community with its compulsory crop rotation and the system of "open fields". The increase in demand for wool and, later, for grain and meat, dairy products stimulated yomen to switch to sheep husbandry and intensive agriculture. And in the conditions of the community, this was impossible due to a strictly defined share of cattle grazing on common lands and the preservation of the strip of land allotments. Therefore, the rich peasantry began to strive to withdraw their lands from the sphere of communal routines. This was achieved by exchanging plots, buying them up, "marriage contracts", and sometimes using force. As a result, the property was enclosed.
The fourth estate included those employed in agriculture, as well as people who did not have free land holdings, but only conditional, according to the agreement. Hence the word “copilgoder”, i.e. "Copy holder". The enclosures affected them the most, the copilgodgers had practically no rights. Also in the English village, a small top of free peasants, freeholders, was preserved. Later, capitalist farmers emerged from their tops, and tenants, leaseholders, who held land with landowners on a short-term lease, and cotters, small-land peasants who worked for hire, also remained in the fourth estate, including artisans, factory workers, crowds, tramps, and robbers. Here is what Harrison writes in his book "Elizabethan England": "Regarding slaves ... - we do not have those ... This fourth and last sort of people has no voice or power in the state, but it does not govern others. This class includes the crowds of our servants. ”
The expropriation of the peasants, which took place over two centuries, should have led and led to the middle of the eighteenth century to the fact that only peasants remained on earth, who became small owners or capitalist farmers. The bulk of the forcibly driven ones turned into beggars, robbers and vagrants. People, deprived of means of coexistence, filled the roads of England. An expressive picture of all calamities is experienced by Thomas More: “The unfortunate people are moving: men and women, husbands, wives, orphans, widows, parents with small children ... They are moving ... from their usual settled places and do not know where to go; all the utensils that are inexpensive, even if she could wait for the buyers, they sell for nothing, if necessary, to sell it. And when they quickly spend it in their wanderings, something else remains for them, how not to steal and get on the gallows according to their deserts or to wander and beggar? ... ”Already in 1956, in Wiltshire, the poor are gathering in detachments of 60 - 100 people take grain on the roads of traders. In 1597, crowds of hungry people attacked carts carrying bread in the harbor, and a whole ship with grain was captured near Lynn. However, the robbery was connected not only with the scope of the enclosures, but also with crop failures in 1594 - 1598. In the summer of 1596. food prices compared with 1593g. tripled. Wheat cost 7 shillings per bushel, the same amount of rye. In London, in December, wheat cost 10 shillings per bushel, in Bristol - 12-15 shillings, in Shrewsbury - 18 shillings. Prices rose not so much due to lack of grain, but because of the activities of speculators, dealers and dealers.
The peasants driven from the land were the core of the people wandering along the roads of England. The sizes of vagrancy were undoubtedly very large, however, there was practically no information about these sizes. It is well known that under Elizabeth Tudorbrodyag in London there were 50 thousand with 200 thousand inhabitants. In addition, the army of people expelled from the earth was replenished with two more categories of population. One of them appeared after the Rose War (1455 - 1485), when Henry VII was engaged in the destruction of military units that held large lords. This was necessary to prevent unremitting civil wars. The lords were too weak to protest, and peacetime required other peaceful pursuits. Armed units were unnecessary. For the most part, these were arrogant and war-hardened hooligans who did not cost anything to kill or rob. But there was another way, when knights threw swords and became farmers, participating in the enclosure.
The third category appeared after the closure of the monasteries in 1536 - 1539. Of course, some monks received pensions, but didn’t get much more. Incidentally, it would be wrong to assume that the monasteries and abbots did not engage in enclosures. There was practically no difference between spiritual and secular landowners.
Also, most of the monastic lands before secularization were surrendered to the Warend or under the control of the local nobility, and the monks became only recipients of rents. After the closure, the monasteries fell into the hands of landlords, who sought to squeeze as much out of these lands.
It should pay attention to the peasants, who, after driving away their land, sought to find new income, namely, became wage laborers. Already from the middle of the XVI century. the capitalist industry, it develops due to the expropriated peasants absorbed in the quality of labor.
The highest concentration of labor was observed in the second half of the 16th century. coal industry. Wage workers in the coal states of England appear even in the middle of the XVI century. At the beginning of the 1960s, in England there were already 3 to 4 thousand miners and about 2 thousand workers engaged in the transportation of coal. At the end of the XVI century. the total number of workers in the mines reached 3.5 - 5 thousand people. In the early years of the XVII century. the number of miners grew to 21 thousand, and together with workers engaged in the transportation of coal, the army of workers reached 30 thousand people. A particularly sharp jump in the number of miners - coal miners occurred in the period from 1560 to 1600.
There is no doubt that, in particular, in the Northumberland and Durham coal basins, the working population was alien. The minority was constituted by workers of local origin. Workers came to the north of England from Scotland, but most of them were expropriated in connection with the enclosures by peasants from the south-eastern and central counties.
The new workers were not accepted by the local population as equals, because the peasants of the northern regions did not yet know what the enclosures were and what they entailed. Locals regarded the newcomers as a lower class. For them, the ragged and vagabonds reaching for the mines were the dregs of society thrown out of their counties. They were hated, despised, looked at as competitors, taking their wages from honest people.
Only the Elizabethan Statute of 1563 laid the foundation for the compulsory collection of donations for the maintenance of the poor. In this statute, measures have been more accurately defined in relation to persons who do not want to pay the tax on the poor. A person who is not willing is called to the next session of the justice of the peace. Law of 1572. states that beggars over 14 years of age who do not have the right to take alms are scourged and stigmatized during the first capture, are declared state criminals in the second, and executed in the third. Also, therefore, each parish was made responsible to the poor for the law, and anyone who received poverty benefits could be sent to their place of birth. The world judge could spend part of the funds raised by the poor to buy land for building work houses, the inhabitants of which should work under pain of corporal punishment . Law of the Poor 1601 consolidated the existing practice and formed the basis of the self-taxation system in favor of the poor, work houses, parish aids. This system existed until the industrial revolution destroyed it. Law 1576 prescribed to open in each county two or three working houses, which were called correctional. They housed workable beggars and tramps. Funds for maintaining work houses were taxed in favor of the poor.
The rules prevailing in workhouses can be called penal servants, because the whips appear as punishment for all misconduct, and only one penny relied on the prisoner's daily maintenance, while the caretaker received 12 pence.
The accumulation of homeless and impoverished people in cities was extreme and caused concern to the city authorities regarding public peace and all kinds of diseases. Therefore, city government seeks to protect the city from a remote influx of the poor. Migrants were also undesirable for urban artisans. After all, besides the fact that they turned entire neighborhoods into slums, they were also potential competitors to artisans - old-timers. The members of the workshops were crowded out by people without proper rights and without proper training.
The city authorities are beginning to demand high pledges from migrants who want to do craft within the city. In relation to London, special parliamentary decrees were issued, as a result of which the poor could not find refuge in it.
In 1597 A law was adopted to provide for the poor, distinguishing three poor families: the able-bodied, the children, the unworkable.
The working poor were prescribed by law to give work. Unwilling to work were punished. For the unemployed should build a fortress. The costs of the poor were covered by the tax collected by the warders. If one parish of the county was too burdened by the poor, then other parishes were also involved in paying the tax. With the consent of the two world magistrates, the churchwarden and the overseer of the poor were entitled to teach, in fact, to serve the children of poor parents, whose consent is not asked.
At the same time, the law "On fraudsters, vagabonds and working-poor beggars" was issued. He abolished all previous laws on this issue, ordered the establishment of correctional houses and determined who should be attributed to the categories mentioned in the title of the statute. Incorrigible vagrants were ordered to conclude correctional houses, to be sentenced to galleys for life, and to be expelled from England.
It began at the end of the XV century. the process of landlessness of the peasantry sharply exacerbated the social contradictions in the country. Resistance of peasants to violent expropriation, their struggle for land took place in various forms. One of these forms was the numerous peasant lawsuits against which protests were held in the Star Chamber of the House of Petitions, various collective petitions appeared: “His Excellency Highness the King. In humiliation and with tears, we declare your highness we, your poor subjects ... recently, a certain John Pomeriz Westangmering, Esq., Acquired this manor from your highness ... oppresses, disturbs and disturbs his subjects, copy-holders of this homomanor ... this John Pomer took away ... pastures ... and these pastures together with other lands ... And after a short time ... by force and against their will took away from your poor subjects their homes, land, holdings and orchards, ravaged and demolished some of their homes ... and burned some of their houses “I have forcibly expelled your poor subjects from this seigneur ...” Often litigations took on a protracted nature. As a rule, justices of the peace decided the business benefit of those in power. But even if the justice of the peace decided the case in the holders and decided to leave the fields open, the landlord continued to fence off. The other is the actions of the peasants inside the manor: spoiling hedges, grazing cattle in fenced forests and parks. The spontaneous attacks on agents of the lord or of royal officials in separate villages sometimes served as a prologue to the uprisings; local skirmishes could have developed into a mass movement in the current tense atmosphere. So, in particular, an uprising began in the small town of Louth in the north-east of Lincolnshire in 1536, subsequently covering a large territory and threatening to spread to neighboring counties. Peasant unrest was caused by secularization of monastic lands produced under the act of dissolution of 1536 (37 monasteries were closed in Lincolnshire out of 51). The Lincolnshire rebellion erupted in early October. Tolpakrestyan arrested the royal officials who arrived to take the property of the abolished monastery, and located in the neighboring town of the Royal Commission, which was engaged in the layout of the subsidy for the county. The very next day, neighboring villages were captured by the uprising.
The participants raised a banner symbolizing the faithfulness of the Catholic Church. The rebellion petition program included demands to stop dissolution, punish Archbishop Kranmer and other bishops, supporters of the Reformation, and defer payment of subsidies to the king.
In the era of initial accumulation, the transfer of land into the hands of new owners was accompanied by a breakdown of the existing system of land relations, a reduction in legal holders and small tenants, an increase in fencing, an increase in rents, and the replacement of hereditary and lifelong forms of holding with short-term leases. Therefore, the demands to stop the secularization put forward in the petition program of the “Lincolnshire people”, drawn up by representatives of the clergy and gentry who headed the uprising, also reflected the interest of the peasantry, who was striving to maintain the old land use system. Thus, the interests of the peasants, who constituted the bulk of taxpayers, met, in particular, the clause on the deferral of payment of subsidies to the king. This explains the active participation of the peasantry in the uprising at all its stages.
After the suppression of the uprising in Lincolnshire, part of the peasant troops moved to Yorkshire. The movement swept west and north Yorkshire, Westmoreland and Durham. The “five wounds of Christ”, a crucifix and a cup were depicted on the banner of the rebels, monks and priests walked in front of the rebels. After the capture of York, the uprising took the form of a religious demonstration (a campaign in London, called the “Pious pilgrimage”). However, the noble leaders of the uprising, having approached Doncaster, entered into lengthy negotiations with representatives of the royal government. A program document was adopted here, consisting of 24 points, in which the captains of peasant detachments took part in the voting. The king’s demagogic promises (including orders to investigate complaints about enclosures and excessive rents and establish solid files), the noble leaders led to the cessation of the campaign. New outbreaks of the rebellion of the Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmoreland peasants in January-February 1537 were quickly suppressed.
The main driving force of the Northern Uprising of 1536 was thousands of peasant detachments, a large place in the program of their uprising was occupied by the demands of the peasant communities, the main of their requirements were the fixing of parliamentary acts of payments for the resumption of holding and the implementation of the statutes against enclosing and seizing land. Thus, the social essence of the movement of 1536-1537 is concluded in the struggle of the peasants for land, against undermining the foundations of the peasant economy.
In the fall of 1547 - in the spring of 1548. The southern central districts became the scene of peasant movements: Hertfordshire, Somersetshire, Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Essex, Surrey, Worcestershire, Sussex, Kent, Oxfordshire and Bershire. And in the summer of 1549 two large peasant revolts broke out almost simultaneously: in the southwest (in Devonshire and Cornwall) and in East Anglia (the uprising of Robert Ket, or the "Norfolk Uprising").
The uprising in the southwestern counties, which began in June 1549, like the Northern Uprising of 1536, took place under religious slogans (for the old Catholic faith against the Reformation). The bulk of the participants in the movement were peasants who used typical peasant methods of struggle: attacks on noble estates, seizing property and arson, destroying land in fenced fields. In August, the uprising was crushed.
The peasant uprising, which began in July 1549 in Norfolk, where peasants of several villages destroyed the hedges established on communal lands by the lord of Manor, was especially large after the Upr Tyler uprising. Soon the uprising swept most of the county. At the head of the rebels, who sent to Norwich, small squires stood up - entrepreneurs Robert Ket and his brother William. The movement was attended by detachments of peasants from neighboring counties, as well as artisans and the urban poor of Norwich. In the rebel camp near Norwichbyl, a Maushold petition was developed, including 29 articles. Although the unrest in the summer of 1549 covered more than half of England (Cornwall, Devonshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Herefordshire, Somersetshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Hampshire, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire) they did not movement and were defeated by the government one by one.
The defeat of the mass movements of 1549 opened the way for the further expropriation of the peasantry. Separate outbreaks of peasant resistance took place in Kentow in 1550, in Buckinghamshire and on the Isle of Wight in 1552, in Devonshire and Derbishirev in 1569, and a number of other places. The mass movement of peasants against the fence began in 1569 in the north and was used at the first stage by the local nobility for their political purposes. Interestingly, the vast majority of the participants in the uprising of 1569 were not the holders of the rebel feudal lords, but the peasant royal domain and secularized church estates, who suffered from the growth of feudal payments and massive enclosures. Peasants refused to pay rent, destroyed hedges, smashed the estates of landowners, including representatives of the new nobility and large tenants, and destroyed manorial documentation.
For the classical times of the Middle Ages, the most common form of farming was small-scale farming of direct producers - peasants ubiquitous domination of small-scale producers. By the 16th century, the production capabilities of such an economy were beginning to be exhausted. The heat-producing forces that developed in small-scale individual production, which formed the basis of the feudal mode of production, already gave their maximum effect. Further development of the economy lay in the path of replacing small-scale production with socially concentrated large-scale production. The enclosures became an intermediate period between feudal and capitalist formations.
In England, before the industrial revolution, there was a manor that was divided into two parts: domain and holdings. The lord could use the domain at his own discretion, while holdings were leased to copyholders, leaseholders (short-term tenants), freeholders (free holders close to private owners), cottages or cottages (low-land peasants who worked for hire). A common form of holding in the 16th and early 16th centuries. there was a copyhold, which got its name from the custom, by virtue of which the holder’s name and conditions of holding were entered into the protocols of the manorial court, and a copy was issued to the holder from him, which was the right to hold the land. In the XVI century. right holders were fragile. So, the lord had the right to attach the land of land owners to his possessions, and then it was more profitable for him to give it to landholders or to enclose. Subsequently, the Lords took advantage of the legal fragility of the rights of copyholders to increase the profitability of the land due to the falling price of money.
XVI century became the heyday of the new nobility or gentry (as far back as the 15th century the nobility divided into a new old one), which managed to take advantage of the new conditions and adapt to i-capitalist farming. The old nobility, living at the expense of feudal rents or service at the court of the king, lost its significance and remained a significant part in the western and northern counties. The core is the nobleman of the middle hand. Here is what Hamlet says in Shakespeare’s drama about the rise of the gentry: “He has a lot of land, and fertile; if the cattle own cattle, then his nursery will always be at the royal table ... "
The closure of monasteries and the secularization of their lands by Henry VIII gave a very big impetus to further enclosures. Due to the purchase of monastic lands, the seizure of communal lands and peasant allotments, the depleted allotments of the new nobility. However, even before the secularization of groupings, the gentlemen rented land from monasteries and even monastery churches.
The scope of the enclosures became very large and this could not but cause concern and concern of the government. The number of taxpayers has decreased, the country's defense capability has weakened. It is not surprising that the British government fought the agrarian coup, despite the resistance of the new nobility. However, the statutes, commissions, laws did not have an effect, fencing continued. In 1549 Warwick legalized them, introducing the collective responsibility of the entire village for the destruction of hedges. Their destruction amounted to a criminal offense, and rebellious gatherings were punishable by death. In 1593 legislation against restriction of enclosures was generally repealed. The government came into conflict with itself. On the one hand, a new nobility, capitalist farming, and on the other, hordes of ragged people, beggars, ready to go as an ardent initiator of the uprising. Vagabonds and paupers were a formidable reminder of the rebellion, like the Wat Tyler rebellion and combustible material for unrest. Therefore, along with acts against the enclosures, cruel bloody laws were issued that could not contain the wave of uprisings. But because of the strong differentiation within the peasantry, which still relied on community-based organization, the locality of these movements, limited by the size of the one-parish and district (the largest of them did not go beyond individual regions), the socio-economic unevenness of the country's development, the period of the Reformation, which was important as a disconnecting factor from - for religious differences, these movements did not become widespread, did not play any role and were quickly suppressed. The struggle of copy-holders and free-holders, and other layers of the earth was unsuccessful.
In essence, enclosures, the expulsion of peasants from the land, subsequent uprisings, and Tudor legislation were natural transition processes. So, K. Markspishet: “In the history of initial accumulation, the era consists of coups that serve as a lever for the emerging class of capitalists, and above all the moments when significant masses of people suddenly and forcibly break away from their means of existence and are thrown onto the labor market ...” Subsequently, the enclosures will justify themselves . Even their contemporaries criticized them until the middle of the 16th century, from the middle of criticism began to decline, so that at the beginning of the 17th century. be replaced by voices of fencing defenders.
The feudal mode of production expanded and brought benefits to a predetermined period and gradually outgrew its borders, having come to its decline and loss, giving way to a new mode of production.
England XVI century differed from other countries of feudal Europe in that the decomposition of feudal relations and the development of capitalist production took place in it more intensively and, moreover, both in the city and in the countryside. This was the beginning of the process of economic development of England, which led it in the middle of the 17th century to the bourgeois revolution, and two centuries later, in the 19th century, turned England into the most powerful capitalist country, into the "workshop of the world", as it was called then
In the XVI century. the main industry of England was the textile industry; England owed him primarily the growth of his wealth. The most important feature of the wool industry in England was that capitalist production in it developed faster than in other sectors; “Every ordinary cloth-maker gives work to many hundreds of poor people,” he said of cloth-making in England in the first half of the 17th century. one contemporary. Since the shop-floor regulation in weaving was weaker than in other branches of production, the process of property stratification among weavers and other artisans-producers was much faster than among other artisans. In addition, the possibility of increasing profits, due to the increasing demand for English cloth both in England itself and in other countries, early stimulated the penetration of capital accumulated in trade in the production of cloth and the transition of small-scale production to large-scale production. The successes of the English sheep husbandry and the availability of cheap labor created by the process of property stratification of the peasantry and especially by the forced depopulation of peasants in the 16th century also contributed to the emergence of capitalist manufactories in the textile industry. Already from the middle of the XV century. decentralized, or scattered, cloth manufactories appeared in England. In the XVI century. decentralized manufacture has become a widespread form of large-scale production in the wool industry. But there were many large centralized cloth factories. In connection with the development of industry in England, forests were quickly destroyed. The use of coal was all the more important. Coal from the XIV century, was used in England mainly for heating homes. In the XVI century. the success of production development stimulated an increase in coal production. The center of this mining was the city of Newcastle in the northern county of Northumberland, from where coal was transported along the Tyne River and by sea to London and other cities, as well as abroad. Coal deposits were also developed in the county of Gloucestershire.
Coal and ore mining was carried out by miners and miners organized in special associations (like workshops in cities), who received mines and mines held by landowners. In the XVI century. In connection with the deepening of mines and the complexity of their equipment, mines and mines began to pass into the hands of entrepreneurs, subordinating the associations of miners and miners
Despite significant successes in the development of manufactory, in England XVI century. in general, small craft production continued to prevail. In many cities, the craft guild system was still maintained. The economic development of England in the XVI century. The fact that after the coup in world trade, connected with great geographical discoveries, it turned out to be in the center of world maritime trade routes, contributed a lot. However, the main condition that determined the success of the development of capitalism in England at that time was that the process of initial accumulation, which forms the background of the capitalist mode of production, took place in it much more intensively than in other countries. The expropriation of the peasantry, which was the basis of this process, as Marx points out, in the classical form took place only in England. It began at the end of the XV century. and ended in the second half of the XVIII century. the disappearance of all the English peasantry.
The land in medieval England was feudal property, it was in the hands of the nobles, the church and the crown. The bulk of the English peasants did not have ownership of their land plots. Free holders - freeholders paid lords for land plots a small rent and had the right to freely dispose of them. But freeholders made up a smaller part of the English peasantry; its majority consisted of copy holders - who had bought out the freedom of the Villans in the past. The conditions for holding the copy-gold were fixed in the XIV-XV centuries, during the liberation of the peasants from serfdom, and became the custom of manor; the kopigolder was only the hereditary or lifelong holder of his plot, he paid the lord of the feudal rent for it, usually money. When this site was inherited by children, sold or exchanged, he was obliged to seek permission from the lord and pay a fee. The kopigolder took the oath of allegiance to the Lord and sued in the manorial curia.
The English countryside was still characterized by the primitive field-cultivation technique (triple field) and forced crop rotation; the transformation of arable land after harvesting into a common pasture was mandatory for all members of the community.
In the XVI century. in the position of the English peasantry, dramatic changes came. With an increase from the end of the XV century. The demand for English wool both in Flanders and domestically and with rising prices for it, sheep breeding has become more profitable than agriculture. Many large landowners engaged in profitable sheep farming.
They began to turn the lands of their estates into pastures. Not content with this, they began to seize communal lands that they had previously shared with their holding peasants, as well as driving the holding peasants from their allotments and turning these allotments into their pastures, while demolishing peasant houses and entire villages; nobles enclosed the land fenced with a picket fence, ditches, hedges. By extracting these lands from communal land use in this way, they leased them to large cattle farmers, receiving high rents, and sometimes they bred large flocks of sheep on them or turned them into hunting parks. This process of forced landlessness of the English peasantry was called enclosures. “Your sheep,” wrote Thomas Mohr, a contemporary of these events, “are usually so meek, satisfied with very few, now they say they have become so voracious and insatiable that they even eat people and devastate entire fields, houses and cities.”
Many well-to-do peasants sought to free themselves from the shy communal land-use practices that prevented them from increasing the profitability of their economy; they also carried out captures and enclosures of community pastures and their allotments, thus contributing to the ruin of fellow villagers.
The peasants driven out of the land filled the ranks of tramps, and in the end they were forced to sell their labor to entrepreneurs in the city and village. The increase in the number of people deprived of livelihoods was also facilitated by the political events of that time. Henry VII (1485-1509) in order to weaken the old aristocracy that survived the Scarlet and White Roses after the war, issued a statute on the dissolution of all military squads. A large number of people who were previously employed as combatants in the service of large feudal lords were thrown into the labor market.
An important role in the process of expropriation of the peasantry in England was played by the reform of the church carried out under Henry VIII (1509-1547).
About a third of the lands of England were in the possession of the church, constituting the “religious stronghold of the traditional relations of land ownership.” (K. Marx, Capital, vol. I, p. 727.) The reform of the church was accompanied by the abolition of all monasteries and the confiscation by the crown of their property and land. The monastic lands were partly distributed to the royal favorites as gifts, partly sold at very low prices to the nobles, farmers, various land speculators and wealthy citizens. Among the new owners of the monastic lands there were many landowners of a new type who sought to receive as much income as possible from the acquired lands. They began to increase rents, as well as intensively enclose lands, massively driving away peasants who held these lands as usual and enjoyed inheritance rights to their allotments. After the liquidation of the monasteries, most of the monks and other ministers of the monasteries lost their livelihood.
In the second half of the XVI century. due to urban growth, demand for bread, meat and other agricultural products increased. Large specialized farms began to appear in the village, which required compact plots of land allocated from communal lands, which also contributed to the spread of enclosures and the expropriation of peasants.
In addition to direct seizure of peasant land, the deaths of poor peasant farms were also caused by the increase in rents and other payments carried out under the conditions of the “price revolution” by those large landowners who broke the traditional forms and conditions of hereditary holding. According to Harrison, the author of The Description of Britain, published in 1578, “landlords doubled, tripled, sometimes every seven times increased the fee for allowing peasants to own property upon inheritance, forcing copy-holders to pay heavy fines and loss of holding for any trifle.”
Thus, in England created a mass of landless, deprived of livelihoods and shelter people, forced to sell their labor to the owners of manufactories and large farms for the lowest wages.
This process of forced landlessness of the English peasants by the nobles was a prerequisite for an agrarian coup, through which the old, feudal land tenure in England was transformed into a new, bourgeois type, and a transition was made to the capitalist organization of agriculture; this coup lasted almost 300 years.
Most of the land captured by enclosures, the nobles, as already indicated, leased to farmers. The richest farmers switched to the exploitation of the wage labor of agricultural workers - cotters and low-land peasants, and thus became capitalist farmers. By the end of the XVI century. From the representatives of various social groups of the village and the city — prosperous peasants, small and medium nobles, merchants and entrepreneurs — a layer of wealthy capitalist farmers has already formed, paying landowners a capitalist rent that is higher than the fixed feudal rent.
The use of wage labor in the countryside was rapidly increasing. In the sixteenth century, according to the testimonies of estates, in England the number of agricultural workers and low-land peasants increased. In one dialogue of the late 40s of the XVI century. it was said that among the village population there are many cotters who "do not have their own lands, but only their own hands." Prosperous owners in the village endowed such poor people with patches of land for short-term rents, which, however, did not allow these poor people to exist without selling their labor. Cotter was an agricultural laborer; The land plot of Kotter was a profitable way for rural entrepreneurs to bind workers to their economy and strengthen their exploitation.
With the growth of the capitalist structure in the countryside, agricultural production increased, its marketability and specialization increased. Significant successes in the XVI century. did English sheep farming. By order of Elizabeth, the export of sheep from England abroad was prohibited under the threat of severe punishment. In the second half of the XVI century. with increasing demand and prices for agricultural products, there was an increase in other agricultural sectors. Crops of grain crops, flax, hemp, saffron, vegetables, hops increased; they began to better fertilize the soil with manure, lime, seaweed, and in the villages located near London, and garbage from its streets; in order to increase soil fertility, sowing of clover began. At the end of the XVI century. Drying of the biologist began in the eastern counties of the country. During this century, 34 agronomic works were published in England, in which the growing interest in rational farming methods found expression; in many of these works fencing was defended as an important way to increase farm profitability, and the experience of the then advanced agriculture in the Netherlands was promoted.
But the development of the capitalist structure in the countryside was uneven. It took place mainly in the central and southeastern counties. According to the government commission, which examined cases of enclosures in 4517, central counties accounted for the largest number of fenced lands, expropriated peasants, and destroyed peasant houses; in the second half of the 16th century The enclosures in these counties have further increased.
While in Central and Southeast England the process of initial accumulation and the emergence of capitalist relations in the city and the village developed very intensively, the north of England in the XVI century. It was an economically backward region: needlework and coal mining developed slowly, the economic importance of cities was small, and their trade relations with the center and south of England were still weak. The land was cultivated by feudally dependent peasants, the nobles usually did not conduct their farming and lived on feudal rents. Cattle breeding played an important role. Peasant farming was loosely connected with the market, preserving natural-economic features. True, in the north, there were cases of nobles raising rents collected from peasants and lords taking communal lands with the aim of turning them into hunting parks. However, there were still few cases of fencing for household purposes, and the village life in the counties of the north for the most part kept its medieval feudal system almost untouched. The beginning of the development of capitalism in England was accompanied by important social changes. Back in the XV century. in connection with the intensive development of commodity production in England, the feudal class began to stratify into new and old nobility. The new nobility, or gentry, consisted of those representatives of the small or medium nobility who switched to commodity production on their estates, raised sheep, profitably traded wool and other products of their estates; in addition to exploiting the peasant holders, the gentry began to successfully use wage labor to cultivate the land, thus rapidly increasing its income. Those of the nobles for whom the feudal exploitation of the peasants remained the main source of subsistence made up the old nobility. The agrarian revolution and the beginning of the development of the capitalist way of life in the village in the XVI century. intensified this process of stratification of the English nobility.
Many representatives of the small and medium nobility and even some aristocrats, mainly in economically advanced counties, began to quickly turn into bourgeois landowners: they vigorously expropriated and enclosed communal and peasant allotment lands, widely used the labor of cotters and poor peasants in their estates as hired labor force, transferred to leasing their land to farmers, introduced agrotechnical improvements to increase the profitability of their estates; their estates were closely linked to the market.
With the transition to capitalist forms of production in agriculture, land has become an object of profitable investment; wealthy peasants, citizens and officials in the XVI century. willingly acquired land. Many of them thus joined the ranks of the gentry, because in England, unlike other countries, nobles became not by origin, but by land wealth, and anyone who acquired land property in an amount sufficient to lead a nobleman’s lifestyle, usually received a noble title.
During the XVI century. the land holdings of the new nobility increased significantly due to the seizure of communal lands and peasant plots, the purchase of monastic lands (after the abolition of monasteries) and the estates of ruined aristocrats. “Every gentleman flees to the village,” one royal chaplain observes in the first half of the 16th century, emphasizing the desire of these nobles to increase their land holdings. In addition, prosperous gentry often engaged in bourgeois entrepreneurship in the field of industry and trade, thus further increasing their fortune. With all this, one should not imagine the new nobility as a bourgeoisie in the full sense of the word. These were landowners, and a significant part of their income was land rent. Their agricultural business and lifestyle were closely connected with the feudal system of the English countryside. Therefore, they should not be called the bourgeoisie, but the bourgeois nobility. However, a significant part of the nobles in the XVI century. received its income mainly in the form of feudal rents levied on the peasant holders, remaining, therefore, the old, feudal nobility. To him belonged the bulk of the aristocracy, consisting of representatives of ancient aristocratic families who survived the Scarlet and White Roses and repressions against the rebellious nobility in the 16th century, and a significant part of the new aristocracy created by the Tudors from their favorites through land grants. For the most part, the nobility of the northern counties remained feudal. And in the remaining counties of the country, far from all the small and medium nobles were bourgeois.
On the basis of interest in the development of capitalist relations in England in the XVI century. the rapprochement of the new nobility with the rising class of the bourgeoisie began. In addition, as already indicated, in England XVI century. wealthy citizens themselves began to acquire and lease land and turn into noble landowners and large farmers. It also contributed to the convergence of the bourgeoisie and the new nobility. So in the XVI century. an alliance of the emerging bourgeoisie and the new nobility began to take shape, which played an important role in the 17th century bourgeois revolution.
In the conditions of the agricultural coup of the XVI century. and the beginning of the development of capitalism in the countryside, the process of property stratification among the peasantry intensified. Many well-to-do peasants began to switch to renting land from the nobility and to exploiting wage labor, thus turning into capitalist farmers. The bulk of the peasants began to turn into landless farm laborers and low-land holders, semi-peasant semi-proletarians.
These changes in the property status of the English peasants, as well as the acts of forcible expulsion of peasants from the land and the seizure of communal lands, dealt a severe blow to the rules of communal land tenure, weakened the resistance of the peasant community to the onslaught of the noblemen; wealthy peasants, often turning into farmers, decomposed the community from within.