One of the old lefty tropes is about to have another run:
The English peasant died during the enclosure of our common land. Enclosure, codified in a succession of Acts of Parliament through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, not only privatised land across England, but installed a mindset in land management that took us away from usufruction (use rights) to dominion (exclusionary ownership rights). It tore to shreds the peasant traditions that valued sustainability, resilience and environmental stewardship long before they were the buzzwords of our current environmental and economic crises. The countryside became a resource to be exploited for personal gain, rather than the landscape-scale larder and medicine cabinet it once was, tended, gardened and managed by and for the community.
We were all happy when we were larping peasantry therefore we should abolish private land ownership and…..
Well, the usual story. One which gets the whole history of commons and enclosure entirely wrong - as is usual in this retelling. Commons rights were exclusionary, not inclusionary. Only commoners - much more akin to the petit bourgois of the countryside than anything else - gained such rights and who did and who didn’t was rigidly enforced by the manorial courts. That many landless labourers did not gain a piece of land of their own at enclosure is proof of how many did not, in fact, have commoners rights. It’s also not true that people were driven off the land, rather they were sucked, tempted, by the higher living standards of the industrial towns. Our favourite observation of this is that when agricultural wages were some 8 shillings a week in Dorset they were 25 shillings near Blackpool. Up north the farmers had to pay more to keep their workers from running off into the Satanic mills.
It’s also true that returning farming to that organic tapestry of small farms would starve most of the population. It is only large scale industrial agriculture that feeds us after all.
But the real argument against returning to that peasant lifestyle is that the peasant lifestyle is, by modern standards, appallingly poor. As the article - and presumably the associated book - point out there are trusts that buy up land to recreate those smallholdings (which in themselves are more like immediately post-enclosure but still). Which have, over decades, managed to re-land whole dozens of people. It’s not a majority interest shall we say even as the opportunity is there and as it should be in a free and liberal society. For the obvious reason that trying to scrape a living out of 20 acres of Wales is going to be scraping a very poor living indeed.
Peasantry means poverty. And why would we want that back?
Tim Worstall
Something that does amuse us is that one of the best records of how a commons, with commoners, commoners rights and so on, works is concerning Minchinhampton Common. Now run by the National Trust it does indeed still operate on those old commons rules and laws. They were written into the donation documents at the insistence of HG Ricardo, the seller in 1913. Who was, yes, the great-grandson of David Ricardo. The common belonged to the Manor of Minchinhampton which was associated with, part of, the Gatcombe Park estate that Ricardo senior bought upon his retirement from The City and before he sat down to write his book on lands and rents and all of that. Which is just one of those things that does amuse.