EXPROPRIATION OF THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

T VHE object of this article is to summarize the results of recent study of the expropriation of the English peasantry; a problem organically bound up with the investigation of the parliamentary enclosures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which formed the subject of my previously published work.' The main problem here, as Soviet historians understand it, is the succession of different forms of landownership: common ownership, feudal ownership, and small, independent peasant economies. The last-named derive, as we believe, from the disintegration of feudal ownership. They subsequently decline and are squeezed out by the modern private (bourgeois) ownership of the big landlords. The peasant economy is then replaced by a form of capitalist production in which the tenant farmer or leaseholder exploits the labour of hired agricultural workers: this serves as a source of capitalist rent which the farmers pay to the landlords. Soviet historians of the agrarian question link up the succession of different forms of landownership with the succession of different forms of feudal rent, the transition to the monetary form of feudal rent and its further development and transformation into capitalist rent. In particular, the level and extent of peasant landownership are, in our opinion, the result of the evolution of 'rental' relations and of the development of capitalist rent in England in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The 'specific weight' of peasant landownership is inversely proportional to that of the 'improved' and capitalist rent in the total of manorial incomes. Of course, the successful penetration of 'improved' and capitalist rent into relations of landownership should be studied in conjunction with the geographical peculiarities of the individual districts, the concrete historical conditions of time and place, general economic factors, the prices of agricultural and other products, etc. What, then, primarily interests Soviet historians studying the history of the English peasantry in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries? The main problem lies in determining the social laws which made themselves felt in the English village in the period of so-called primitive accumulation (in Marx's understanding of this important term2) in connexion with the birth of the new social formation