#历史开讲 #
Wen|箫purple circle
Editor|Dream into the magic machine
The reason why the promoters of parliamentary enclosures spare no effort to promote enclosures is often because they want to make a name for itself in administrative affairs.
Similarly, opponents of the enclosure did everything in their power to obstruct the enclosure in large part to defend their autonomy.
With the deepening of the development of parliamentary enclosures, it has also had a profound impact on the British rural autonomy.
The game played by rural residents around the enclosure has objectively and sometimes even directly changed the functions and connotations of the rural self-government system.
The demise of the village community and the strengthening of the centralization of power by the gentry
Before the 18th century, rural communities based on land co-ownership used to be an important support for the middle and lower classes of rural people to manage rural public affairs and safeguard their own autonomy and interests.
However, as the parliamentary enclosure progressed, strict private property rights were established and protected by law, both on cultivated and pasture land that had already been developed, and on undeveloped wasteland, corresponding to the disappearance of the de facto collective or co-ownership of rural land before the enclosure.
This fundamentally shakes the foundation of the rural community and brings a devastating blow to the rural community.
Although villagers can still rely on the village community to fight tenaciously in the process of parliamentary enclosure, the parliamentary enclosure is ultimately a historical trend, and the village community that accompanies ancient traditions will eventually be eliminated by history, and efforts to maintain it will ultimately be futile in any case.
With the end of the parliamentary enclosure at the end of the 19th century, the village community also withdrew from the stage of history.
It just becomes a memory in the minds of those who miss the "beautiful countryside" of yesteryear.
The demise of the village community not only brings economic losses to the lower ordinary people in the village, but more importantly, in terms of village autonomy, the lower class people in the village have lost an important platform for managing public affairs.
Their voice in rural politics has been further reduced, and they have to be more controlled by the top figures in the countryside.
In fact, the erosion of communal land rights in villages and the disintegration of village communities took place long before the large-scale start of parliamentary enclosures in the 18th century.
The enclosure movement of the Tudor period, the prosperity of the land market in the early modern period, and the continuous penetration and increasing marketization of the agricultural capitalist mode of production are all encroaching on the living space of the rural community, and the parliamentary enclosure has become the last key driver of the eventual demise of the rural community, and its importance cannot be ignored.
For those beneficiaries of communal land rights, especially the underprivileged in the villages, their public rights such as gleaning, fishing, peat mining, and tree felling were ruthlessly stripped away along with the parliamentary enclosure.
While in most cases they receive some compensation (usually a small plot of land), these compensation are often not enough to sustain them or even to cover the cost of enclosures that are shared among them.
As a result, many of the rural poor became full-fledged wage labourers after the parliamentary enclosure, and before that they had been able to manage village public affairs to a certain extent in the village community.
The reason is that they have de facto rights on the land, and some public affairs in the countryside are closely related to their interests.
Now that they have lost these public rights, they have naturally lost their autonomous right to manage public affairs and can only work on the orders of their employers to earn wages.
In this case, it is not surprising that the village community has become a source of water and a tree without roots, and its rapid demise is declining.
Parliamentary enclosure abolished common land rights
Secondly, in addition to abolishing the common right to land and establishing a completely exclusive modern property rights system, the parliamentary enclosure has also caused a large-scale population movement in rural areas, and the main body of the movement is still the original small land holders in the countryside and the poor at the bottom.
Marx's classic argument holds that the enclosure of land "prompts the rural inhabitants to become the proletariat, to 'wander' them for industry." ”
From later research, Marx's statement is slightly one-sided, because the population expelled from the rural land due to the parliamentary enclosure did not completely flow to industry or towns, and a considerable number of people still lived in the countryside.
It's just that they have lost their fixed homes and have to move in search of a job that can make ends meet.
One of the reasons why village communities can be formed and stable for a long time is that the inhabitants of the village can live together for a long time, and everyone performs basically the same work at basically the same time.
On this basis, a village community of mutual help and unity is formed.
However, after the parliamentary enclosure, villagers who were once neighbors in the same village may have to leave their own villages for their livelihoods, and they can no longer play any role in the management of the previous villages, and this constant population movement makes it impossible for the villagers to form a stable and strong cohesion.
Therefore, the decline of the rural community is inevitable.
An example from Nottinghamshire provides clear evidence of this: in 1774 during the siege of the Radley commons, to which the village of South Will belonged in the county, 43 persons with communal rights on the commons sold a small parcel of land allocated to them in the enclosure according to their share of public rights to a man named George Haugkinson, including 1 hired labourer, 4 peasants, 8 widows, 16 small craftsmen or petty traders, and other people who could not be identified.
These men, after selling their small plots of land in enclosures, became proletarians and had to leave their homes "to Norfolk, Staffordshire and London." ”
As can be seen from this example, along with a land enclosure case, dozens of members of the rural community who once owned land sharing rights and struggled at the bottom of society went to different places.
In this case, it is impossible to maintain the village community as before. Corresponding to the decline and demise of the rural community, with the continuous concentration and redistribution of rural land by the parliamentary enclosure, the political discourse power of the rural upper class with the squire as the main body has been further enhanced, and the trend of centralization of power by the rural gentry has become increasingly obvious.
The squires in rural English society in the 18th and 19th centuries included not only traditional manor lords and large land aristocrats, but also powerful tenant farmers and wealthy peasants, and practitioners of land-related industries such as land lawyers and estate agents.
These newly rising rural elites took advantage of the parliamentary enclosure to amass and concentrate land by various means.
In addition to hoping to make economic profits through land enclosures, the other purpose of this is to increase their social status and political influence by holding real estate.
Occupy a place in the political arena of the village or even higher in the county in which they are located.
Since ancient times, land has been the most important material wealth in British rural society, and it is also the symbol that best reflects the status of a rural resident, and it is closely related to political power.
Until the early modern period, the political right to vote and the right to stand for election were linked to their land tenure. This political and social nature of land beyond economic value remained true in the 18th and 19th centuries.
"In the industrialized era, land with great economic characteristics was the material basis for the political success of a family."
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand the behavior of the squires who made their fortunes through agriculture to further accumulate land through parliamentary enclosures.
Some scholars vividly describe the mentality of the gentry class to hoard land as a means to obtain political benefits for themselves: land ownership is the easiest way to gain political influence.
As a magistrate, he (referring to the new squire) could be on an equal footing with the older squires in the Quarter Court, and he could participate in all matters relating to local interests and development when his business habits made him feel the need.
Through the parliamentary enclosure, the squires also achieved their political goals, and their political influence in rural society increased significantly.
Still taking the enclosure case of the Radley Commons in Nottinghamshire, George Haugkinson, who bought the land of the co-owners, was not an ordinary man, he was a local lawyer, and he was also the land agent of Sir Richard Sutton and the Archbishop of York, and the superintendent of the estate belonging to the village of South Well.
His multiple identities make it easy for him to participate in local enclosure activities, and there is evidence that he played an active role in the local enclosure application process and actively amassed land in the process of enclosure.
Eventually, he owned a 145-acre farm in which he built a large house and several other agricultural facilities, transforming him into a dignified squire, and his influence in the area increased significantly.
At least it is known that he drove out dozens of members of the village community who might have opposed him at once.
Haugkinson's development was not an isolated case, and in 18th-19th-century England, "aristocratic estates were widely amassed in many counties, and property was both the basis of power and a prerequisite for political activity." ”
In 1831 the British counties were officially divided into 523 miniature court districts, and the officials of these mini-courts were basically local squires.
In mini-courts, they "listen to matters, make prompt rulings, check the accounts of supervisors, license taverns, and try to manage weight and means [in market transactions]." ”
This is evident in the centralization of power by the gentry during this period, and it would be difficult for them to do so politically without the parliamentary enclosure to help them amass influential land wealth.