Tenure and the land market in early modern England: or a late contribution to the Brenner debate

Abstract

B renner's purpose in his original article in Past and Present was to explain the various routes and speeds by which different European regions developed capitalist forms of agricultural organization.2 In doing so, he argued for the centrality of the 'agrarian class structure', that is the balance of class relationships within the countryside, in dictating developments. This article will not attempt to discuss the whole model but will offer a critique of Brenner's account of the English experience in the early modern period (and suggest that agrarian class structure alone is not an adequate explanatory device) before proposing an alternative route to the future which, in one sense, turns Brenner's views upside down. I shall probe the limits of our knowledge and, where knowledge fails, offer speculation as a stimulus to future research. The speculation may prove to be ill founded. As Shaw remarked when championing Elgar and Cockaigne, to offer it may be to damn myself 'to all critical prosperity with a gaffe that will make your grandson blush for you'.3 But the risk is one I am happy to take. Brenner regarded the existence of large commercial farms, held on lease from absentee rentier landlords and worked by hired wage labour, as the distinctive feature of the eighteenth-century English countryside. He accepted the estimate of Mingay and Thompson that by c. I700 English landlords controlled 70-75 per cent of the cultivable area of England and he equated this with the area farmed by large, market-orientated enterprises.4 These farms produced for a national if not an international market. They represented a marked contrast with French agriculture in which peasants, that is small scale, subsistence farmers, continued to predominate until a much later date. The large English farms were, in Brenner's analysis, created by a deliberate landlord policy which was aided if not abetted by the Crown, which was permitted by the destruction of the property rights of the English peasantry, and which entailed the expropriation of their land. 'With the peasants' failure to establish essentially freehold control over the land, the landlords were I An earlier version of this paper was read to the seminar on late medieval and early modern economic history, All Souls College, Oxford in i987: in making revisions I am grateful for the comments I received then and for the criticisms of Drs Joan Thirsk and Bridget Taylor and Professor D. M. Palliser. Many of the issues raised in this paper form the subject of the writer's continuing research. 2 Brenner, 'Agrarian class structure'. 3 Shaw's Music III (i893-1950), ed. Laurence, p. 722. 4 While the figure is perhaps of the right order (though it conceals large regional variations), the equation of landlord control with a specific type of farm is unsound.