The Social Distribution of Landed Property in England since the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

The social distribution of land in England has been subjected to the probes of historical scholarship in two distinct phases. At the end of the last century the great concern of progressives for a wider diffusion of landownership and the creation of a massive body of English peasant proprietors led to inquiry into the circumstances of the earlier disappearance of such a body, and produced the studies of Tawney, Johnson, Gonner, Hasbach, Slater and others, all bearing on the question of the distribution of land between small owners and the rest. Then after an interval there has been a return of interest in our own generation, and under the lead once more of Tawney, in his second seminal penetration into the land, and of Habakkuk, this has produced studies by Trevor-Roper, Stone, Finch, Simpson, Joan Thirsk, Chambers, Mingay, and many others, which collectively furnish a great body of ideas and information on the subject. Although all these studies have been in some measure concerned with the causes and consequences of the distribution of land in various periods, their aims have usually been to use this approach along with others to illuminate some more general historical event or situation. Thus in the earlier phase of inquiry the sympathy and conscience of historians were engaged on behalf of the sufferings and fate of the exploited class, the peasantry, whether in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century, and indignation was vented by ascribing these miseries to the injustices of capitalism and capitalists. In the second phase the studies of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have been marked by a concern with the origins of the Civil War, and a desire to bring to bear analysis of broad economic and social movements